MOST OF the water we use each day is not directly consumed by us through drinking or washing. It is used in the production of our food and drink. If we change the food and drink we consume, we can save water. According to the video below, EACH of us could save over 1200 galloons a DAY (that's about 5455 litres). Some examples:
Drinking a cup of coffee - 177 litres of water to produce the coffee
Drinking a cup of tea - 40 litres
Saving = 137 litres of water
Eating a dinner of beef and bread - takes 2323 litres to produce the dinner
Eating a dinner of chicken and baked potato - takes 468 litres
Saving = 1855 litres of water
Also notice the argument in favour of drinking beer!
Recently I have read a number of articles that predict wars - not too far in the future - over access to water supplies. Before it gets to that, which policies could be introduced to encourage water conservation?
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In my opinion it is aint the coffee in my cup, that can lead to clean water shortages, it is manufacturing. Factories use millions(or mabye more) tonns of water every day and if we change our food preferences it wont make any significant difference (except job losses in coffee production industry). It is like trying to hold your breath for 5 minutes, in order to reduce CO2 emissions. What we can really do to save water is modernizing our factories and machines so they use less water. We can encourage producers to do it by imposing the law that will make someone pay for using , for ezample up to 1 tonne of water per day, so that it will not affect households. However the prices then will deffinetly increase. Therefore we need to compare all goods and bads , of imposing this law or allowing producers to spend as much water as they want, and decide which is the best decision.
ReplyDeleteYes I certainly agree more direct control of water use by industry could help.
ReplyDeleteBut the point is that the manufacture of, for example, 1kg of coffee uses more than four times the water of producing the equivalent amount of tea.
Therefore as consumers we can switch our demand away from these water thirsty products.
As we know from our supply and demand graphs, the effect will be to redistribute resources to those products which use less water in their production processes.
This is market forces in action, a possible way in which individual decisions can have an effect, without waiting or trusting our politicians to do something.
Also perhaps the sacrifice is not that great - giving up a beef burger for a chicken burger, for example.