Water Footprint of Products

Water Footprint website: http://www.waterfootprint.org/

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:

http://www.waterfootprint.org/?page=files/Presentations )

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):

http://www.waterfootprint.org/?page=files/productgallery

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

Source：www.waterfootprint.org

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:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=mMtT7IH4AV4

Alternatively, one can choose to adopt a “3/4 rice/veggies/fruits + 1/4 protein diet” that US 1^st 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. :>