Professor Arjen Y.
Hoekstra from University of Twente, Neitherlands, set up the
website to inform the world about the water foot print of products. Prof Arjen Y.
Hoekstra is also a United Nation scientist who specialise on Water issues.
During international conferences, Professor Hoekstra presented on global water usage. ( Prof Hoekstra presentation slides is available for download at:
In his presentations,
Professor Hoekstra showed that:
*The water that a UK consumer uses at home accounts
for only 3% of his water usage.
*97% of his water usage is embedded in
the products he buy from the supermarket !!! [ A person would “use” 3400 litre (of water)/ day for agricultural products & 1100 litre/ day for industrial
products. ]
Professor Hoekstra has the following recommendation:
The indirect water footprint of a consumer is generally much larger than
the direct one. A consumer has basically two options to reduce his or her
indirect water footprint. One option is to change the consumption pattern by
substituting a specific consumer product that has a large water footprint by
another type of product that has a smaller water footprint. Examples include: eating
less meat or becoming vegetarian, drinking plain water instead of coffee, or
wearing less cotton and more artificial fibre clothes. This approach
has limitations, because many people do not easily shift from eating meat to
being vegetarian and people like their coffee and cotton.
A second option is to select the cotton, beef or coffee that has a
relatively low water footprint or that has its footprint in an area that does
not have high water scarcity. This requires, however, that consumers have the
proper information to make that choice. Since this information is generally not
easily available, an important thing consumers can do now is ask product
transparency from businesses and regulation from governments. When information
is available on the impacts of a certain article on the water system, consumers
can make conscious choices about what they buy.
[ Slide 86: comments
section in power point slide]
The Waterfootprint website has a products footprint section
(updated in 2012):
|
Producing 1kg of
|
Water usage
[litres]
|
|
Tomato
|
214
lt
|
|
Lettuce
|
240 lt
|
|
Orange
|
560 lt
|
|
Apple
|
822 lt
|
|
Corn
|
1220 lt
|
|
Rice
|
2500 lt
|
|
Chicken
|
4330 lt
|
|
Pork
|
5990 lt
|
|
Mutton
(sheep)
|
10,400 lt
|
|
Beef
|
15,400 lt
|
From
the table, we can see that producing 1kg of green leafy vegetables such as
lettuce needs only 250 litres of water. Producing corn and rice needs 1200 to
2500 litres of water, but producing 1kg of meat requires 4,300 to 15,400 litres
of water. Thus, producing meat requires 5 to 60 times more water than producing
vegetables !!!
Thus,
reducing meat consumption and eating more vegetables (as recommended by Prof
Hoekstra) is an effective way a consumer can choose to reduce his water footprint.
In
addition, the following facts are shown in the Water foot print website:
*The global
water footprint in the period
1996-2005 was 9087 Gm3/yr (74% green, 11% blue, 15% grey). Agricultural
production contributes 92% to this total footprint.
*Water scarcity affects over 2.7 billion people for at least one month each
year
………
Currently,
1 billion people in the world are short of water.
From
the above 2 websites, we can see that 70% to 90% of the world’s water is used
to produce food. (& 97% of the water we used is embedded in the products we
buy from the supermarket)
Thus,
the current practice of saving water at home (i.e. taking shorter baths,
switching off the tap when soaping our hands), are NOT sufficient to
help to conserve the water of the planet. [We still have to save water at home
as it is a good practice and water usage contributes to our utility
bills.]
To
effectively conserve the world’s water resource, we would need to reduce intake
of food that are heavily water-intensive (i.e. meat) & choose to eat food
that is less water-intensive (i.e. grains, fruits and vegetables).
One way
to start is to support meatless days. [www.veggiethursday.sg ]
Meatless
Mondays in Belgium:
Alternatively,
one can choose to adopt a “3/4 rice/veggies/fruits + 1/4 protein diet” that US
1st lady Michelle Obama promotes in US. [ http://www.choosemyplate.gov/ ]
Let’s
do our part to help to conserve the water resources in the world. :>
