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Photo: Randy Son of Robert
MAYBE YOU’VE EVEN used an online calculator, like this one provided by the Nature Conservancy, to determine how your daily activities contribute to carbon emissions.
But have you heard of a “water footprint”?
It may just be the new buzzword in the eco-movement.
GOOD Magazine explains:
“As we become more and more aware that we may be using water at an unsustainable pace, the idea of water footprints—the amount of water an individual uses—is becoming more common.”
Yet, the magazine notes, calculating one’s water footprint may be even more challenging than calculating a carbon footprint, “since everything you eat and buy used some water to produce.”
Fortunately, GOOD put together a handy chart to help you get a sense of just how much water you’re using. The chart distinguishes between “direct use,” the actual water you use, and “virtual use,” the water used to make the objects you use but which you’re unlikely to see or be able to measure.
Today’s a great day to check out GOOD’s chart- it’s World Water Day.
Let me know if you’re as surprised as I was to learn that coffee requires 37 gallons of virtual water to produce that one cup you drink each morning? Or that tea requires 9 gallons of virtual water? (Yet one more reason why tea wins the smackdown against coffee!).
Community Connection:
Did you know that global water consumption is doubling every 20 years? Do you have ideas about how you can reduce your own water consumption? Check out this article from our archives and share your ideas in the comments.
Julie Schwietert
Julie Schwietert Collazo is a writer, editor, researcher, and translator currently in New York, formerly of Mexico City and San Juan.
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Good. Finally. I’ve always been horrified at water waste, seriously, even since I was a little kid – bizarre and hard to believe, I know. People seem to think there will always be enough water whereever they live – droughts are for other people. I think all lawn sprinkling should stop everywhere, as a very basic beginning step. Grass does not have to be green.
After the great republican depression subsides , and the cost of living is at rock bottom, like that of most third world countries, the average American citizens, those of us who survive the economic holocaust, the rapes of the cities by starving urban Anarchist mobs, the Asian money-men take-over and the death of the Union as it was in its best days, will fish for bare sustenance in the sewers the earlier American Empire made of the lakes, rivers and ponds of the country. Nuclear waste strewn about like garbage, by a power hungry greedy, uber-rich social order, the McCainanites, is hard to avoid, and as cancerous as ever, killing animals in the fields, contaminating veggies right in the Shanty gardens and lighting the landscape some evenings with an eerie glow. Water! we need Water, they cry out, those sick from radiation from a dozen busted broken looted reactors, but alas! every drop polluted by the “Black Rains” after the Asian invasion! Water! Water!, the new American cry, not oil this time. Water!
[...] 42.) Watch your water footprint. [...]
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