Celebrated on March 11th each year, World Plumbing Day is an international event initiated by the World Plumbing Council in 2009 that recognises the important role that plumbing plays in everyone’s health and safety.
Plumbers are best placed to understand how plumbing influences people, business, industry, politics and economics. However, in developing countries, plumbing is either non-existent or at best very basic. People suffer serious health consequences, and millions of people die as a result of a lack of access to clean water and effective sanitation.
John Thompson, APHC Chief Executive Officer, commented: “Plumbing saves lives and improves the world, yet according to the World Health Organisation, 2.1 billion people do not have access to a safe, clean water supply at home, and 4.5 billion people do not have toilets in their house. 900 million school children across the world have no handwashing facilities and 361,000 children under the age of five die each year due to water born diarrhoea because of water contamination from open defecation.”
The World Plumbing Council has highlighted a number of significant improvements over a 15-year period, which include over 1 billion people gaining access to piped water supplies and the number of people practicing open defecation declining from 1,229 million to 892 million. Plus, the global population of people who used managed sanitation services has increased from 28% in 2000 to 39% in 2015.
John Thompson added: “March 11 is now a fixture in calendars around the world for plumbers. The key aim of World Plumbing Day is for people to promote the link between good plumbing with sanitation and health, which is none more so relevant with the current Coronavirus outbreak which highlights the importance of being able to access clean water and handwashing facilities.
“I hope that as an industry, we’ll get behind World Plumbing Day and help shine a light on the many highly qualified and proficient professionals that we have in our industry who help keep people of the UK healthy and safe.”
The plumbing industry can fly the flag for the UK on World Plumbing Day by downloading and using resources from www.worldplumbing.org/world-plumbing-day-resources.
APHC will be active on social media during World Plumbing Day informing consumers that they are able to source local, qualified and APHC backed plumbers at www.FindAQualityPlumber.co.uk
