By taking small steps to conserve water, you can help the planet in big ways.
Just because water comes gushing out of our faucets, it doesn't mean that it's an infinite resource.
According to the April issue of National Geographic, Americans use about 100 gallons of water at home each day, compared to millions of the world's poorest who subsist on fewer than five gallons of water per day, per person; 46% of people on earth don't have water piped to their homes; women in developing countries walk an average of 3.7 miles to get water; and most alarmingly, in 15 years, 1.8 billion people will live in regions of severe water scarcity.
In the same issue, National Geographic explains this water shortage: The Tibetan Plateau, a huge sheet of ice and snow that feeds all the major rivers that supply about two billion people in more than a dozen countries, is rapidly shrinking due to its sensitivity to global warming.
To save water and put less pressure on nature, we need to be more mindful about how we use water. Switch off the faucet when brushing our teeth, turn off the shower when we shampoo or lather up, install water efficient toilets, dish washers, and washing machines.
There is currently financial incentives in replacing old appliances with Energy Star ones. This incentive extends to include low-flush toilets. If you don't have time or money to replace the toilet, simply bottle a jar or plastic bottle of water and sink it into the toilet's flush tank. This will displace an amount of water that translate to a easy and sound earth friendly practice.
Does a low-flush toilet really matter? The EPA declares that an estimated 4.8 billion gallons of water are flushed down the toilet every day. According to the American Water Works Association, the average household uses 20-28 gallons per day just to flush the toilet. The Energy Policy Act of 1992 took a step in reducing water waste by mandating that all new toilets produced for residential conform to a 1.6 gallon-per-flush (gpf) standard, moving away from conventional 3.5 - 5 gpf models
For those who already know about carbon footprint, learning more about water footprint will heighten awareness of how much water each consumer product and business practice consumes.
A product's water footprint is an inventory of the total amount of water that goes into its manufacture. For a cup of coffee, for instance, it costs about 40 gallons of water to grow the coffee plant and to cool the roasters during processing.
This doens't mean that we need to give up our java, it means that we need to stop assuming that a cup of coffee is just a cup of coffee. Regardless of a cup of coffee's price, we're paying an environmental cost whether we realize it or not.
The water footprint is designed to help consumers and businesses understand just how much water is required to make products.
However, it's a great deal more complicated than that as experts try to consider all the factors involved in tabulating the environmental cost of water usage and wastage.
Counting gallons is not enough. Before consumers can know what to do with the water footprint number, they need to know where that water comes from.
For example, Corn grown in Minnesota depends on rainwater, which is abundant and not otherwise used by people. But in Arizona, corn crops compete with human consumption. The current definition of the water footprint doesn't address these discrepancies.
In a study published in the February issue of the journal Global Environmental Change, an authority on the subject of water footprint named Ridoutt proposed a strategy that takes the original location of the water into account when evaluating the environmental impact of its use in product manufacturing.
To illustrate, Ridoutt chose two common household food items: an 18-ounce jar of Dolmio pasta sauce and a small bag of peanut M&M's. For the pasta sauce, the volume of water needed to grow the tomatoes, sugar, garlic and onions added up to 52 gallons. For the M&M's, the total volume going into all the ingredients was a whopping 300 gallons.
Comparing these conventional water footprint values would lead one to think the bag of M&M's takes a far worse toll on freshwater resources. But that isn't the complete picture, Ridoutt says.
Because tomato plants are typically grown in hot, dry climates, they are watered using irrigation systems that draw from the same locations as human drinking water. On the other hand, the cocoa and peanuts in M&M's are grown in more temperate regions, where the crops absorb rainwater directly from the ground. Taking location into account, Ridoutt says, drastically changes how you think about the water going into your food. According to his calculations, the pasta sauce is about 10 times more likely than the M&M's to contribute to water scarcity.
Ridoutt is not the only one trying to redefine the water footprint. Conservationists around the world are trying to figure out how to best include environmental impact in the footprints so they can be incorporated into food labels. The International Organization for Standardization now has a project underway to tackle this problem using methods similar to Ridoutt's.
Although many researchers support Ridoutt's work, others say we don't yet know enough about global water cycles to accurately measure environmental impact. Organizations such as the Water Footprint Network and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) still believe that simply reporting the total volume of water is currently the best and clearest way to communicate a water footprint.
Whatever the experts say, it's always a good idea not to waste a precious resource like water.
Source: WWF
