Half a litre of water to charge your iphone! I learnt this from the Blog Action Day website and it astonished me.

Today is Blog Action Day 2010. Blog Action Day is an annual event held every October 15 that unites the world’s bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day with the aim of sparking a global discussion and driving collective action. This year’s topic is water.

It was brought to my attention by Darren Rowse across at Problogger when he wrote a couple of days ago: Will You Be Blogging for Blog Action Day?. I read his short post and then headed over to the Blog Action Day site.

Blog Action Day 2010: Water from Blog Action Day on Vimeo.

So, why do I want to bring the issue of water to your attention today? Not just because

• almost a billion people on the planet don’t have access to clean, safe drinking water. That’s around one person in every eight or 12.5% of the world’s population.
• or that lack of safe water and sanitation cause around 80% of all diseases and kill more people than all the wars and crime put together.
• or because of all of the people that die, the largest proportion are children as many of their bodies aren’t strong enough to fight diarrhea, dysentery and other nasty illnesses.

But, also because it is also something that many of of us in UK and other similar countries take for granted……we turn on the tap and water comes out.

However, there is a problem with that. That can make us lazy and wasteful.

So, apart from raising awareness of Blog Action Day 2010:Water, I also wanted to ask us all to be more conscious of water and other resources in our lives and our businesses.

We have been taught and schooled to conserve energy over the years by changing light bulbs to more energy efficient ones, turning the lights off when we are not in a room, not leaving equipment or the TV on standby mode etc etc.

These are the sort of conscious things that we should be doing for all of the resources that flow through our lives and businesses. Why? Because it matters. It matters to your bottom line through lower costs, it matters to your customers and your people because it shows them you care, it matters to all of us because a little contribution from each and everyone of us adds up to a whole heap of change that will change our world for the better. And that is a good thing.

One final thing, we should also support the work that is being done by the UN to get safe water to many people around the world that don’t currently have it. Click on the image below to add your name to the petition encouraging the UN to continue their good work.

Thanks to Benedict Garcia for the image.