With the ever-expanding population requiring more food and water for daily needs, usable water is being exhausted. In regions like India and Africa, water is scarce and clean water is even scarcer. When one takes into account the agricultural, industrial, and mankind's water consumption, soon the world could face these same water crises. Consider this: to make 1 pound of plastic it takes 24 gallons of water. It takes about 39,090 gallons of water to make the average car, and 53 gallons to make a single to-go latte (Tree Hugger). In developing countries, India, Kenya, and Uganda for example, there is no way to sanitize their dirty water. However, if the world were to become more water efficient, and become better at cleaning the water that is already available to us, then this problem can be resolved. .
This is a relatively new problem in the world; over the last hundred years the human population grew from nearly one billion to seven billion people. All of these people need water to survive. One could argue that the rise in population is mostly from the Industrial Revolution, the time period when we started to build more factories, and improve the way we make and use items. Henry Ford created the assembly line to make his Model T's faster and cheaper. Skyscrapers were built, penicillin was invented, and farming as we know now began to take shape. Instead of plowing fields by hand, workers were now able to use cattle to pull their plows across the fields. There were also new machines that could harvest crops faster and more effectively than humans could ever do. This era added about one to two billion people to the planet by increasing our carry capacity, which is the maximum number of individuals of a species that can be sustained by the world. As the carrying capacity increases, the amount of people that can live on the planet also increases. The Green Revolution launched the carrying capacity skywards.
