Water Footprint Homework

So, for the water footprint homework assignment, I have decided to change things a little bit by having you compare the results of four different calculators. This is due to my dislike for each of the four calculators for one reason or another (see comments below).

The extended calculator at www.waterfootprint.org is the most extensive of the four and is quite thorough with agricultural and domestic water use but uses only income to calculate most of your industrial use. Also, while the domestic use inputs are relatively straight forward, the ag (food) are not. How long would it take you to determine how many kilograms of starchy roots, on average, you eat per week? For someone who really wants to get a good handle on their water use (particularly related to their food consumption), this is a good way of going about it; for our purposes, it is not. For the income input in this calculator, I would like for you to use the median income for 25+ years old with a Bachelor's Degree of higher ($60,493 for men, and $40,483 for women) according to the US Department of Commerce.

On the other end of the spectrum, Unilever via Go Blue has a promised One Minute Water Calculator which takes into consideration only domestic use, which, as we learned today accounts for only 9% of total water use in the USA.

The calculator at www.h20conserve.org is heavy on the domestic use inputs but also looks at a few additional non-ag consumption factors like bottled water, recycling, and rainwater harvesting. It also states at the end that the average American uses 1,190.5 gallons of water per day which is few less than the 1800 that is used more often (Hoekstra and Chapagain, 2007)

The Kemira water footprint calculator has a good variety of a limited number of inputs and certainly has the most impressive graphics.

Go to Sakai and complete a footprint using each of the four footprint calculators. Use your living situation here in Lex for your calculations. This homework assignment is set to "survey" mode and so I will only know whether or not you have completed the assignment, the specifics of your submissions will not be linked to you.