What is Your Water Footprint?
We hear a lot about carbon footprints, but what is your water footprint? I am a pretty low carbon girl, but wow, I was humbled by my estimated water consumption, i.e. footprint. And the biggest cause of my gigantic water footprint is my carnivorous nature. Meat is by far the largest component of my water footprint, and if you are also a meat-eater, I bet that your water footprint is equally large.
Much like the carbon Footprint calculator, you can enter in some numbers at Waterfootprint.org to determine your own water use.
The water footprint website is a great resource to educate yourself on how your favorite beverages, foods, clothing, industrial products consume water. So it is not necessarily how much water you personally use, it is much more about how the products you consume in turn consume water. For example, do you like beer? It takes seventy-five litres (19.81 gallons) of water to produce that pint (technically 16 ounces, but most bars serve a 14 ounce beer as a “pint”) of delicious ale or lager. But why so much water, you be asking? It takes a lot of water to grow barley, hops, and the other ingredients that go into beer. Not a beer drinker? That six-ounce glass of milk or juice takes even more water — roughly 44 gallons of water for a glass of orange juice, 50 gallons for apple juice, and almost 53 gallons for a glass of milk.
To really freak you out, one kilogram or 2.2 pounds of beef takes 15,500 litres or 4100 gallons of water. So if you ate an eight ounce steak last night needed almost 950 gallons of water to end up on your plate. Honestly, if the sheer volume of water needed to produce meat for consumption is not a strong argument for going vegetarian, I don’t know of a better one.
Granted, not everyone is willing to cut meat from their diets, and that is alright, but just remember that meat should be viewed at as a luxury, not a right. In the United States, we are a country of meat-eaters and until something major happens, that is not going to change. But what can change is how much meat we do consume and which meats we eat. Chicken requires only a quarter the amount of water as beef.
And I don’t mean to preach to anyone about eating meat or what not, but let’s use today’s topic as a jumping off point to discuss water consumption. Here is a map of the world in terms of water use.
Check out the Water Footprint website to calculate your own footprint and use that as a starting point to evaluate how and where you can cut back on your own water consumption.
I tend to focus on water resource issues, so I am sure I will revisit this topic in the future.
water, water consumption, water footprint, carbon footprint, beef, meat, vegetarian, beer, milk, juice, United States, chicken, diet, water resources, water issues
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