How Much Water Do You Use?

By Debra Tan 22 March, 2012

Happy World Water Day! Coffee or Juice? Beer or Wine? Chicken or Cheese? How much water can you save?

It is World Water Day and everyone is talking about taking shorter showers. In Hong Kong there is an ad about encouraging 5 minute showers ….

A shower uses 2.5 gallons per minute. So a 5 minute shower is 12.5 gallons of water or just under 50 litres (47.3 litres to be precise). Seems like a big water saving compared to taking a bath. An average size bathtub filled is 200 litres of water.

If only if it were that simple, in reality, we are consuming much more water ….

The moment we wake up… breakfast! Breakfast could take up as much as 5.8 bathtubs if we just had two slices of toast with two eggs washed down with glass of apple juice and of course a grande latte to wake us up.

We move on to lunch … we switch from coffee to tea. Drinking tea with a dash of milk, that saves water. But hang on, should we have the chicken or cheese sandwich? In water terms, we can have almost four cheese sandwiches for every one chicken sandwich. Looks like lunch could now be an additional 1.7 to 4.8 bathtubs of water!

Dinner … assuming an unhealthy dinner with no veggies or carbs, an 8oz steak shoots us straight up to 17 bathtubs (or I could have another cheese sandwich). Moving on to a more palatable topic … the choice between wine or beer. Wine seems like the better water-savings option but the beer is a pint after all. Anyway, the choice between wine and beer is insignificant when you compare the water that went into producing the steak.

So in a day just by our choices in these food and beverages, we would have racked up 20-28 bathtubs full of virtual water content on top of our 5 minute shower.

And that is just our food. A simple t-shirt and jeans combo costs us another 68.5 bathtubs of water and we are going to assume that most reading this would be using an electronic device. A computer chip requires around 7,500 litres of ultra-purified water to make – that is at least another 37.5 bathtubs.

When the average water resource per capita of China is 25 bathtubs per day, our consumption choices matter.  Since we all own something made in China, all our choices matter.  The five pairs of jeans we have in the cupboard that we haven’t worn, 275 bathtubs of water wasted.

Depressed? Cheer up … you could always switch from drinking coffee and juice to wine and beer! And this doesn’t mean you should take a longer shower. Every drop counts!

To see how much water Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing and Tianjin have … click here