Over the past month, Facebook and other social media feeds erupted with videos of countless videos of people participating in the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. The challenge was designed to help participants simulate the sensation that sufferers of Lou Gehrig’s disease are all too familiar with. So far, over $98.2 million has been donated to the cause and more than 2.4 million people have participated.

Though the challenge has been wildly successful in raising money, it has been harshly criticized. One such criticism has been an attack on the project for being a waste of fresh water — fresh water that the underdeveloped world desperately needs. This condemnation of water waste, though serious, is mostly baseless.

In 2012, there was an estimated 115 million households in the United States. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, each household uses approximately 400 gallons of water per day. The amount of water used daily in the entire country, then, is around 46 billion gallons. Therefore, during the same 31-day period that the challenge has been active, U.S. residents have used a whopping 1.426 trillion gallons of water.

Assuming each of the 2.4 million buckets held five gallons of water, the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge has used around 12 million gallons of water. This means the amount of water used in the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge in the past month is  .000008 percent of the water used nationally during the same period.

In a country where over 17 trillion gallons of water are used annually, there are more important battles to fight than the the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. While we should be mindful of our water usage and take steps to address it, our hyper-awareness of consumption should not come at the expense of a charity campaign that raised nearly $100 million for a previously ill-understood disease. We misuse millions of gallons of water that benefit no one. Let us criticize that waste instead of the water being used to fuel positivity.

A version of this article appeared in the Tuesday, Sept. 9 print edition. Email Cassie at [email protected].