- Your Water Footprint, by Stephen Leahy, Firefly Books, 144 pages, $20.
Living in Vancouver, it is easy to become very casual about our water consumption.
With the ocean on our doorstep and a seemingly endless supply of water ready to fall from the sky, you can forget the importance of water conservation.
Everything we purchase and almost every action we do has a measurable water footprint, which is the total amount of freshwater required to produce an item or carry out an activity.
Included in that water footprint are the requirements for growing, harvesting,
manufacturing, packaging and shipping. Based on those demands a water footprint measurement can be applied to almost everything.
Leahy discusses global water use and its implications.
As the demand for freshwater increases, the importance of conservation must become a part of everyone's decisionmaking.
Author Stephen Leahy presents an extensive selection of goods and services along with their water footprint to better inform people of the cost of their choices.
A leather sofa contains eight kilograms of leather with a total water usage of 136,000 litres compared to the same one covered in 23 metres of synthetic fabric that only required 1,610 litres to produce.
The water footprint of a cloth diaper is 15 litres while a disposable diaper's is 545 litres.
After bringing to light our over-consumption the final chapter offers a number of suggestions for things we can all do to reduce our water footprint and be part of the solution.
