Water footprints provide compelling insights that can enable governments to understand the role of water in their economy and water dependency, businesses to understand their water-related business risk, as well as informing the general consumer how much water is hidden in the products they use.
Globally, each consumer on average ‘eats’ between 1 500 and 10 000 litres of water per day. Sometimes the water footprint of what we consume is close to where we live but often lies in river basins far away, even in other countries.
Personal Water Footprint
A personal water footprint is not only the water that you use for drinking, bathing, watering your garden, laundry or food preparations, as many think. Your personal water footprint includes all the ‘hidden’ water in the products that you eat, their packaging, and the clothes that you wear.
Every product has its own water footprint, which is the amount of water that was utilised in its production. The size of the water footprint lets us know how much of our limited water resources producing that product has utilised and whether it could be manufactured more efficiently.
While it may be difficult to control how much water is used to manufacture your favourite pair of jeans (apart from joining in international water protests and signing petitions to force industry to use our water resources more effectively), there is still much that each of us can do.
Meatless Mondays is not just about eating healthily for instance; it is about eating less meat for the sake of the planet. A 150-gram soy burger for instance uses only 160 litres of water to produce whereas a pure beef burger uses about 1000 litres on average. Ergo, eating less meat means decreasing your water footprint.
Everything we use comes in some sort of packaging – while you may not be able to change the way thing are packaged, recycling your packaging can save millions of litres of water annually.
You can calculate your personal water footprint HERE.
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