This little chart from the July issue of Mother Jones was somewhat eye-opening to me. It lists a variety of consumer goods ranging from a microchip to a mid-size automobile and the amount of water needed to produce each article. For example: a 16-ounce bottle of Diet Coke requires 33 gallons of water to be produced. Now, there’s a decided lack of explanation as to how the author reached these numbers, but I presume the water is used in a wide variety of ways throughout the production cycle, not simply in a direct correlation to the item. Spread out over transportation, package manufacture, product manufacture, factory infrastructure, and other requirements, any single point in the process probably doesn’t consume all that much water, it’s the aggregate amount (further multiplied by the millions of units produced) that becomes mindblowing.
Water footprint calculations are rapidly becoming as critical to understanding the impact of mass production of consumer goods as carbon footprints, since the availability of potable water looms large as a serious global crisis. Whether people want to believe it or not, the day is approaching where we will be forced to make choices about everything we consume because of our willy-nilly approach to resource usage now.
Here’s another one to make your head spin: the carbon footprint of owning a pet in the industrialized nations is DOUBLE the carbon footprint of owning an SUV and driving it 6,200 miles per year. When the day comes, what’s it going to be: Fido or Ford?
