As the public becomes more conscious of what it consumes, food labeling has slowly followed suit. We now can pick up most items at the supermarket and find out the nutritional information, the ingredients, whether or not the product is organic, the country of origin (sometimes), and increasingly whether or not the product is fairly traded. And then there’s the most obvious labeling of all: the price tag. But what none of those labels tell you is how much water was used in producing that product.
As demand for clean water increases researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA are looking at what industries are using the most water and why. Sciencemag.org notes that it probably won’t raise any eyebrows to discover that “grain and cotton farming top the list, with about 5000 liters of water going into every dollar of the final product.”
But researchers are also able to trace water usage along the product’s entire manufacturing process, which shows us that a lot more water is used to create, for example, a tortilla than one may think.
“[...] manufacturing $1 of tortillas requires a scant liter of water. But because the process starts with corn or wheat as an ingredient and occurs in factories that run on electricity, that buck’s worth of tortilla actually consumes about an additional 500 liters.”
Once we understand which sectors are using the most water, the next step should be to find ways to cut down usage and to conserve.
