What is your water footprint?
In a world where fresh water may well become a scarcer and scarcer commodity, this is going to be a real question.
If you take the time to find out, what you will learn about how much water it takes to produce some products will astound you. Well, OK, maybe not, but it sure astounded me.
In order to make this type of information more available, and to establish some standards in how water usage is determined, a group of six global partners including the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and UNESCO, the University of Twente in The Netherlands have established the Water Footprint Network.
According to the ScienceDaily's online report, the water footprint was developed by UT professor Arjen Hoekstra, who heads the Twente Water Center, to give insight into the water consumption of individuals, corporations and countries.
The new network will promote sustainable, fair and efficient use of water on a global scale.
The ‘water footprint’ measures the amount of water that a country, company or individual uses each year. This includes the water needed to produce goods: the water withdrawn from surface as well as ground water and soil water.
For a simple cup of coffee, for example, an average of 140 litres of water is needed, 2,700 litres for a cotton shirt, 16,000 for a kilo of beef. Taking all this into account on a global scale, we get a water footprint of 7,500 billion cubic metres a year. Per individual this is an average of 1,250 cubic meters a year.
The Water Footprint Network website has an easy to use individual water footprint calculator. Other information you will find is a fairly concise definition of Corporate water footprints, including the example below, of how, where, and what kinds of water are used in the average manufacturing or agricultural processes.
The water footprint of a business - that is its 'corporate water footprint' - refers to the total volume of fresh water that is used directly and indirectly to run and support the business. It consists of two components:
the operational water footprint, i.e. the direct water use by the business in its own operations,
the supply-chain water footprint, i.e. the water use in the business’s supply chain.
Many businesses have a supply-chain water footprint that is much larger than the operational water footprint. This is particularly the case when a company does not have agricultural activity itself but is partly based on the intake of agricultural products (crop products, meat, milk, eggs, leather, cotton, wood/paper).
We live in a world of great interconnected complexity. Unraveling questions of how much water we use, takes a lot more than just checking the water bill. Finding ways to lessen our impact on our local enviroments, and to make sure we aren't just exporting our water usage elsewhere is a task we all have to share in.
A tool like the Water Footprint Network is going to be invaluable, in helping individuals like me find ways to cut my impact, and in helping national and international organizations work together to identify the best points in the worldwide economic system to make changes which will protect fresh water supplies all across the globe.
1 comment:
The most powerful thing a person can do to reduce energy, water and reduce pollution is to go vegetarian. Or at the least reduce your meat intake. Meat especially Beef uses more energy to raise and process than meat it produces, including water and land. We all need to realize that it is not sustainable and drastically cut down our meat consumption. Think of all the water used to grow the grain to feed the livestock and all the land for the livestock and all the fossil fuel to ship the livestock. We could just eat the grain and skip all that and save a lot of water and fossil fuel. Not to mention the cruel way commercial farming treats the animals. We need to get back to basics and put our thinking caps on.
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