This doesn't strike me as particularly accurate, I can't imagine where in the production cycle of a burger all that water comes in, and the site on the image has absolutely no information backing it up, other than vague graphs. Is this just how much water a cow drinks?
How are they arriving at these figures? My assumption is that they're fudging something somewhere.
There's a limited natural supply of fresh water. We can't drink brine, nor can we irrigate crops with it. Desalination is now just about practical thanks to improvements in reverse osmosis, but it isn't cheap.
>>4518 The figures are almost certainly based on American beef production, for cows living in arid areas who have to be provided with a lot of drinking water, and will be fed almost solely on maize and other grains which have been grown in arid areas requiring intensive irrigation.
The water footprint of English cattle would be much smaller. If I've done my maths right, the figures for English beef given by >>4519 are actually worse, somewhere around 4000-5000 litres of water assuming a quarter-pound burger, but note that this figure is including water that falls as rain onto grass.
>>4521 The UK doesn't have a major water problem, in this decade it wouldn't take much extra investment for us to be completely drought resilient, but looking ahead several decades we do really need to invest a bit more in new reservoirs and reduce our reliance on ground-water.
On the other hand, a lot of countries around the world have serious issues. A lot of states in America are relying on water from confined aquifers which take hundreds of years to recover to pre-drilling levels. They are for all intents and purpose a limited resource and they're on a verge of a real catastrophe.
No there isn't. It falls from the fucking sky. There might be a limit in the rate it falls, but effectively the supply is infinite. Also there is the quite obvious detail that the water that is drunk drink is breathed, sweated and pissed out again so it isn't like it is being removed from the system.
>>4527 But you don't expect shitty pisswater to come out of your taps, do you? It takes energy to process it all, something whose price will continue to increase until we crack nuclear fusion.
Which is exactly the limiting factor. If you use water faster than it falls from the sky, you've got a drought. We can speed up the water cycle with desalination, but it's a lot more expensive than water conservation.
Not yet, but there are some very real concerns about localised drought due to climate change. We've made big gains over recent years in reducing leakage, but we're approaching the point of diminishing returns. Thames Water already operate a desalination plant at Beckton; it's only used intermittently and processes brackish water, but it does indicate the relative insecurity of water supplies in the south east.
I don't expect piss water to come out my taps but I expect the natural piss filtering process that has continued unabated
for billions of years to not stop in my lifetime.
