Q: What more can we do to conserve water?
A: A certain amount of mythology is woven into every nation’s identity. Canadians, for instance, tend to believe that our fresh water sources are vast and infinite and that we ourselves are decent water conservers, thank you very much.
It’s a shame that we’re totally out to lunch on both counts.
True, the Great Lakes hold an impressive 20 per cent of the world’s fresh water, but only 1 per cent of that is renewable – not so comforting when you realize that we are the world’s second-biggest water hogs per capita (just behind our neighbours on the other side of those lakes).
How much water do you think you use in a day? Add up every flushed toilet, brushed tooth, rinsed veg, washed dish and cleaned pile of laundry and, just at home, Canadians squander a good 125,000 litres per person per year. (Do a rough calculation of your home’s H2O footprint at goblue.zerofootprint.net.)
Of course you can slim that down by turning the taps off as you lather up your hands, hair, teeth and pans, putting your veggie or rice rinsing water on your plants and doing it all with water-saving shower heads and faucets. But, honey, that’s only the tip of the iceberg.
It’s time to look beyond the droplets we see on the surface of our daily lives and reset our lenses to take in the H2O we don’t see, taste or feel. Yes, manufacturing literally everything around us, including the paper or computer you’re reading this on, involves vast quantities of water (about 10 litres per sheet, says UNESCO, and 1,500 kilograms of water per desktop computer, according to a study from United Nations University).
That top you’re wearing sucked back another 2,700 litres of water if it’s cotton, mostly from a combo of irrigation, rainwater and fabric processing and dying, according to a study published in Ecological Economics. An enormous amount of water is also embedded in the food we eat.
Take the humble apple. How many litres of water do you think go into growing just one? Why, 125 litres. And that juicy fruit with “water” in its name? Growing one watermelon sucks up 385 litres.
Around the world, agriculture accounts for about 70 per cent of all the fresh water we use on the planet. All fine and dandy if the global demand for food weren’t poised to spike by 70 per cent over the next 40 years, all while climate change is expected to put even more stress on our water resources. That according to the UN’s latest world water report released last week.
Not a farmer? What are you supposed to do about all this? Well, for one, buy less. North Americans throw out 30 per cent of the food we buy, letting it wilt or rot before we even get to eat it. All that tossing adds up: the U.S. alone may as well be pouring 37 trillion litres of water down the drain, according to the Stockholm International Water Institute.
You can also eat less of the foods that swallow the most H2O – and that, my friend, would mean kissing beef goodbye, since it takes about 15,000 litres of water to grow the grain to feed the cow to get you just a kilogram of beef. If you’re a meat eater, choose organic chicken or pork instead.But (you know what’s coming, don’t you?) cutting out animal products altogether would shrink your water (not to mention carbon) footprint the most.
According to Water Footprint Network, the average water footprint per calorie of beef is 20 times larger than for cereals and starchy roots. If you’re going to stick to a water-restricted diet, you should also more often choose potatoes (290 litres/kg) over rice (2,500/kg), tea over coffee and, wait for it, minimize your chocolate intake (one 100-gram bar soaks up an astonishing 1,700 litres of water from bean to bar).
FYI, wine involves more water than beer, but winos can shrink their water footprint by minimizing purchases from dryer regions like Spain.
Ultimately, whether you’re eyeing a bag of cheese puffs or a new baggy T, we can all to do our part to reduce our water-hogging ways by buying less of what we don’t need.
Got a question?
Send your green queries to ecoholic@nowtoronto.com
