From Guest Blogger Melanie Lochness: Surprising Water Usage Numbers [Infographic]
How much water are you really using? Many of us have low flow shower heads and our toilets are using less water, but how does that compare to the water that goes into the things we use and consume every day?
We created this infographic to help better understand what our daily impact really is. Some of the information might surprise you…
Courtesy of: Loch Ness Water Gardens
So. to produce 1lb beef uses 1850gals(US) (6.9tons) 1or 1Kg beef uses 15,406litres of water (15.4tonnes)!
I saw similar figures in UK paper, 1KG beef uses 15,000 litres (= 15 cubic metres/15 tonnes) of H2O, (conversions are much easier in metric but I’d still rather buy meat and groceries in Lbs and ozs) It seemed to me that the writer was trying to imply that you could avoid water shortages by going vegetarian. My immediate thought was potable water in the UK costs about £2/m3 so 1Kg (2.2lb)of steak/beef should cost more than £30 to produce but supermarkets can sell it for about £10/KG, something don’t ad up, are we really going to save this much water by not eating beef.
However, it didn’t take alot of imagination to work out how they arrived at these figures. If you take the area of land need to grow a beef, multiply by the years to grow it and then by the annual rainfall, then divide by the weight of beef it comes out at about the figure quoted, which I personally think is a pseudo science calculation. For a start, much of the water that falls on the pasture will end up in water courses whether the beef is there or not.
If you use the same reasoning for fish it requires about 15 million litres (about 5 Olympic swimming pools) of water to produce 1KG of fish, if I recall my calculation correctly, in which case with the amount fish we are eating the oceans should be falling not rising.
OK, I know what these people are trying to say but why don’t they just say what they mean instead of trying to blind or scare the public with pseudo science, just say one acre of land will feed 10 vegetarians or one meat eater, or what ever the ratio is – KISS.
A lot of good points from both Melanie and Nick. I think the most important point which needs to be taken account of is the effect of the nominal water use. Where you have sheep or cattle grazing high pasture where there are few if any other farming options, and rainfall is high then the high embodied water consumption is almost irrelevant – especially seeing as how the vast majority of the water nominally used for meat production in such a location is “recycled” as it percolates through the soil or flows down streams where it can be used again for other purposes.
What is far more important is where large amounts of water are used in water stressed areas for farming or industrial production – such as where cotton is grown in a desert using irrigation. This can have massive repercussions such as the drying of the Aral sea which is causing massive damage in Russia. Switching to crops or production systems which are less water intensive is essential where water demand exceeds sustainable water extraction or huge problems are laid down for the future- up to and including famine and war.
I think it is a very good thing that water footprint is beginning to be taken into account and that measures are starting to be taken to use water more wisely.
According to the above infographic eating 1Lb of beef a week is roughly the same as taking four baths per day, really!
I think we need a better way of calculating a realistic water footprint.