Our Water Footprint | Breakthrough
Water is finite, but our demands for it are not. So in places where we have rivers running dry, what's happening is our demands are bumping up against those limits of the finite supply. Our use of water for agriculture, for food production, for growing cities, and industries is beginning to really max out that water supply. It shows up in the form of groundwater being over-pumped, rivers running dry, and just generally finding that we're sort of running out of the water we need.
A lot of people only think about water when it comes out of their tap, but in fact, our lifestyles require a lot of water. If we're an average American, it takes about 2,000 gallons of water a day to keep our lifestyles afloat, and most of that is in our diet. So we can become more conscious about not wasting food because every time we waste food, we're wasting water. If we want to, we can be more conscious about the kinds of foods we eat, eating more healthily but also food that's maybe a bit less thirsty in terms of the amount of water it takes to produce.
I think there are a lot of ways, just becoming more conscious consumers, we can make a difference. Part of the reason we're in this mess, in a way, with water is that there are so many billions of people now all needing to eat. But if each of us makes decisions, we can begin to scale that back. If we think about our water footprint, about half of it is our diet, and a third of it is our use of energy. All of these daily things that we do involve water, and sometimes quite a lot. You know, it can take 700 gallons of water just to make one cotton t-shirt.
The good news is there are a lot of things we can do to use water more efficiently and to conserve it, which would open up opportunities to restore some water back to nature. For example, in agriculture, there are efficiency technologies combined with information technologies, like sensors, that help us understand how much water we really need to use. That would allow us to get smarter about how we use that water and then, again, return some to the natural environment.