Beyond water: embedded water
When you’re thinking about water efficiency, it’s important to remember that it’s about more than just the water that comes out of your tap. Water’s crucial to so many more aspects of our lives, so it’s essential that we change our attitudes towards a whole range of day-to-day activities
Jargon buster
‘Embedded Water’ is the term for the hidden water that’s used to produce the things we take for granted.
For example, it takes around 2,700 litres of water to produce one cotton t-shirt – that’s enough for one person to drink for 900 days!
What we mean is that it takes 2,700 litres to grow the cotton and physically construct the t-shirt – that’s the ‘Embedded Water’ cost that we rarely think about.
Paper
It takes 10 litres of water to produce a single sheet of paper. Encourage your staff to only print the minimum and keep the rest on your computer. Could you even go completely paper free?
Travel
Motivate your staff to be more active on their daily commute. It takes between 13 and 27 litres of water to produce a single litre of petrol, so even car-sharing or public transport will make a huge difference.
Food
It takes 822 litres of water to produce one kilogram of apples, so it’s important to reduce food wastage. Equally eating healthily saves water too, as it takes an astonishing 17,196 litres of water to produce a KG of chocolate; that’s almost 21 times more than apples!
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We’re fully committed to improving our environmental performance and are certified to ISO 14001:2015. You can find out more in our environmental policy. Our Solutions team are certified to ISO 9001:2015 and ISO 45001:2018.
