Your Water Footprint?

Water, water everywhere
By Trystan L. Bass
Posted Tue Aug 11, 2009 10:06am PDT
Related topics: Food and Drink, Shopping, Fashion, Water More from Green Picks blog 7

We slurp down water after exercising; we delight in long, luxurious showers; we lavish our lawns with gallons of water. But even if we didn't guzzle water in our ubiquitous plastic bottles, we'd still be using tons of water every day.

According to Mother Jones magazine, household water use adds up to only 6% of the water that we consume. The other 94% comes from the products we buy. That's because water is used to grow our food and manufacture our goods. Most everything we own earns a "water footprint" because of that.

For example, a morning latte to-go contains over 50 gallons of water! That includes the coffee (growing the beans), the milk (raising the cow), the sugar (growing and processing the sugar cane), the paper cup, the plastic lid, and the little cardboard sleeve thing.

You don't have to ditch the coffee to conserve water though -- simply start with a reusable mug, which many cafes (including Starbucks) will give you a small discount for using. That cuts out a big chunk of the water needed.

Coffee is one thing. Sure, it's a liquid so that must have some water in it. But even a regular old T-shirt has a huge water footprint. Over 700 gallons of water are needed to make one cotton shirt (one that presumably you wear dry!).

Most of the water is used to irrigate the cotton plant, some of it is needed to dilute the massive amount of fertilizers needed in traditional cotton productions, and the rest is part of the chemical processing of the textile industry. Global cotton production uses 3.5% of the world's water -- and that's not even for a plant people can eat.

Still, you don't want to do without cool clothes. How about organic cotton? Growing cotton without pesticides requires tons less water. And many places sell organic cotton clothing these days, very affordably. Wal-Mart is one of the world's biggest sellers of organic cotton.

With world waterways threatened and 20% of the world's population without access to safe drinking water, conservation should be on our minds. Producing consumer goods like coffee cups and cotton shirts happens all over the planet, so in the U.S. we may be using water that could be diverted from someone else's tap.

Check out the water footprint of some things you regularly buy -- how can you cut down on the gallons easily?

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