Water Footprint - Embedded or Hidden Water

You must have heard about carbon footprint, but may not know what water footprint is.

While sitting at WEX2008 presentation given by Johan Kuylenstierna, the chief technical advisor to UN Water, one slide struck me with how much water is actually embedded in a product.

Here are some typical examples of how much water (in litters) is embedded.

one hamburger (150 g) embeds 2400, 1 glass beer (250 ml) 75, 1 glass wine (125 ml) 120, 1 glass milk (200 ml) 200, 1 cup coffee 140 l, 1 piece bred (30 g) 40, 1 egg (40 g) 135, 1 potato (100g) 25, 1 cotton T-shirt (medium, 500g) 4100, 1 page A4 paper 10, 1 pair of shoes 8000, 1 microchip (2g) 32 and 1 kg wheat 3000.

Coincidently, my colleague Volker Muller sent me a link a few weeks ago on the related topic Growing Sustainable Trends, discussing water footprint as a new perspective measure, similar to carbon footprint, for the society to be more conscious about water efficient products and services.  This should get us to think about water efficiency in general apart from the efficiency of a urban water system itself.

Water is embedded into every thing. Although plenty of water, the earth is covered more by water than by land, but only a tiny percentage is the fresh water resoucres while water demand constantly overtakes the supply.

As fresh water scarcity is an increasing concern, fresh water is becoming more and more precious in many parts of the world. Some countries may be more concerned than the others. For instance, two-fast developing countries China and India, both are having some serious problems with fresh water, see China water crisis and India water crisis. People in the developed countries may be less concerned about water shortage, but we all need to be cautious about how much fresh water is consumed in our activities and products. For instance, how our software solution can help to better manage the water shortage scenarios in urban water systems? and also how to help engineers to design and build water-efficient buildings as striving to achieve energy-efficient ones? You bet,  Water footprint can be a good measure.