Water Footprint
Water footprint is the amount of water used to produce the things we use. It is important to reduce our water footprint by eating less meat, buying local produce, conserving water, and recycling water.
Video
Puzzles
English
Take a Stance
Task 1: Count how many pieces of clothing you don't wear at all. Then, calculate how many litres of water were needed to create these clothes. Design an infographic to detail what you find.
Experiments and Challenges
Task 1:
Count how many cotton T-shirts your family has at home. Work out how much water was needed to make them all. Each one takes, at a minimum, 2,700 litres to produce.
To help you think about how much water is needed to make all those T-shirts, an Olympic-sized pool that measures 50 metres long, 25 metres wide, and is 2 metres deep would take 2,500,000 litres or 2.5 million litres of water to fill it. How many Olympic pools did your family’s T-shirt collection fill?
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Task 2:
Count how many loads of washing your family does in one week. Can you all wear some of your clothing a little more so you wash your clothing a little less? Try doing that for one week and see how much washing you can save.
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It’s hard to say how much water your washing machine uses for each load, as it depends on the size
The average washing machine uses 48.8 litres per cycle. That’s about 330 glasses of water (around 160 millilitres)!
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Average 7 kg washing machine: 43.6 litres per cycle
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Average 8 kg washing machine: 45.2 litres per cycle
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Average 9 kg washing machine: 47.5 litres per cycle
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Average 10 kg washing machine: 51.5 litres per cycle
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Average 11 kg washing machine: 54.9 litres per cycle
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Average 12 kg washing machine: 53.5 litres per cycle
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Average 14 kg washing machine: 62.3 litres per cycle
Weird and Wonderful Facts
Making textiles uses a lot of water, about 93 billion cubic meters of it every year.
Thats enough to keep the populations of India and China combined hydrated for 42 years!
Doing just 5 loads of washing per week in a modern domestic washing machine uses 13,000 litres of water in one year.
When we wash our clothes, microfibers are released and about 500,000 tons of them enter wastewater systems every year, with around 280,000 tons escaping to the marine environment, harming marine animals and their habitats.
