Fresh water is increasingly an issue. Over 1.2B people don’t have access to safe water today. Safe water and good sanitation are two key foundations for a healthy human and animal society. Incredibly, less than 1% of the world’s fresh water is accessible to humans. This second statistic, like the metaphor of our atmosphere being like a piece of paper around a soccer ball, always reminds me that the Earth is a lot smaller than I imagine especially knowing I share it with over 6 Billion brothers and sisters. But, that’s not new. Have you thought about the water content of things in our everyday lives and in our businesses? I have to admit that I hadn’t thought much about it.
I did know that among the reasons that nuclear power is not sustainable is because of its heavy use of fresh water, not to mention we still have no way to take care of the radioactive waste. Power is such a consumer of water that often I think you can’t make power decisions unless you also take into account water use. I know that renewable energy uses a lot less water than fossil fuel energy. I don’t think the conservation of water value is taken into account in energy decisions at least in any major way. I also knew that agriculture is a huge consumer of our water resources to the point that if you are exporting a lot of grain and meat, you are in a very real way exporting your fresh water resources. An interesting table from the World Water Organization, ‘Water Content of Things’, provides a way to think about water and make some choices. The list needs to be more extensive to provide more value in making choices, but it gives you a starting point that you can use to extrapolate for things not on the table.
The table lists the water it takes to deliver things we take for granted. Look at the amount of water compared to the final output of a product to you or your business. The table looks at the water required to make or produce the final product. These are all estimates because so much depends on climate, the process used, the rigor of the company doing the producing, etc. And, they do make it clear that the data is not perfect, since a lot of assumptions have to be made, but even the order of magnitude differences are remarkable and worth taking into account in our lives. A lot of the data comes from www.waterfootprint.org and Gleick2000. Examples from the table are below.
For me in my personal life, many choices were clear:
- Continue drinking more tap water (no surprise)
- Only drink enough milk to meet calcium requirements; drink soy milk instead
- Drink tea, not coffee (that’s tough, but doable)
- Continue eating less and less meat in general (I’m sure I can’t be a total vegetarian)
- Although I am guessing, look for clothing and anything else made from bamboo because it is so quickly a renewable resource and based on my extrapolation, I think requires less water
- For health, I already try to stay away from processed foods, but based on my additional assumptions from the table, another reason to stay away from processed foods since my guess is that they significantly add to the water content of things.
- I choose chicken, steel and probably recycled aluminum based on the table and some of my own added assumptions.
It also seems to me that I need to be more aware and involved in the water decision-making going on around me. In my business, what processes are consuming a lot of water, why, and can the consumption be reduced? Can I influence employee behavior to make different choices on the things they use and consume? What are your choices? Here are some more questions for you to think about:
- Do you think it is important to think about the water content of the things you use and consume whether personally or in your business?
- Is exporting our fresh water resources in what we export a valid concept to you?
- Are the meat, grain, and cotton commodity markets also really trading fresh water resources?
- With the availability of fresh water declining every year here and in every other country in the world, should the water content of things be major focus for process improvement and export decision-making?
Since we think water is a critical and a very limited resource, we’d like to know what you think. Please share your opinion and insights on these questions.
Examples from the ‘Water Content of Things’ Table
Assorted Beverages (per liter)
Glass of beer—300
Glass of water–1
Bottled Water—3
Milk—1,000
Cup of coffee—1,120
Cup of tea—120
Glass of orange juice—850
Assorted Produced Goods (per kilogram)
Bread—1,300
Cheese—5,000
Cotton textile finished—11,000
Potato chips—925
Hamburger, Leather Shoes, Microchip—16,000
Assorted Crops (per kilogram)
Potato—500 to 1,500
Wheat—900 to 2,000
Corn/Maize—1,000 to 1,800
Rice—1,900 to 5,000
Soybeans—1,100 to 2,000
(range for crops, depends on climate and weight of finished crop versus total yield)
Assorted Animals (per kilogram of meat)
Sheep—6,100
Beef—15,000 to 70,000
Chicken—3,500 to 5,700
Egg—3,300
Assorted Industrial Products (per kilogram)
Steel—260
Primary Copper—440
Primary Aluminum—410
(great variation depending on process)
The url for the table is http://www.worldwater.org/data20082009/Table19.pdf, if you’d like to see a few more examples and what they included in the estimates. An even more comprehensive and vetted listing could be a key tool for the world in several ways, but especially where for the sake of water we should reduce consumption or change what we consume and where we need to invest to reduce the amount of water required to produce and/or process the things we use or consume in our daily lives. Of course, reducing fresh water use in landscaping, bathrooms, etc. is critical. Using rain barrel collection (or similar solution) for fresh water in the future will be standard. But, our choices of things to use and consume have a big impact on our water consumption giving us another way to conserve whether in the choices we make or in the process improvements and new processes we use in our businesses to use less fresh water.
Water Content Data Credit to Pacific Institute’s “The World’s Water”
Debbie Deland, PMP, Six Sigma Black Belt
Sustainability Expert, Systems Thinking Practitioner
President, Greater Orlando Net Impact Professional Chapter
Green Leader Panel Member
Tags: Sustainability, Water
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