Over the last several years, summers have been increasingly brutal in many parts of the world. Cities in the Southwest United States have had to plan for droughts and water conservation initiatives. Nearly all parts of the United States have experienced at least some drought since the year 2000 and it’s a trend that is replicated all over the world.
You would think that, given the prevalence of worldwide droughts, we might be more careful with water. You’d think that if you hadn’t experienced humans and their tendency to shoot themselves in the foot, at least. In reality, we waste water in ways that are almost hard to imagine.
10. One Farming Family Uses More Water Than All of Las Vegas
Farms need water and most of us would accept this as a reasonable course of business. No matter what the farm produces, from lettuce to apples to beef, water has to be used to make that happen, and we place more value on the farmed product than the water itself. But can there be a point when a farm uses too much water? Is there a limit there?
A single family, who owns large amounts of farmland, was found to use more water than the entire Las Vegas Valley during a 2023 investigation. The Abbati family, whose farming empire is worth millions, used 260,000 acre-feet of water. That number is beyond anything you can imagine if you aren’t familiar with acre-feet.
One acre-foot, just one, is 326,000 gallons. So 260,000 acre-feet is 84,721,371,429 gallons. In contrast, the Las Vegas Valley used 200,000 acre-feet.
Most of the water in that part of the world is used in the Imperial Irrigation District where 20 farming families use more water than a combined 300 others, totaling about 387 billion gallons in 2022. That district has the largest claim to water from the Colorado River, and one in seven drops goes to these farmers, many of whom don’t actually grow vegetables for human consumption.
The bulk of their land is used to grow hay for livestock. Some of the hay is even sold to other countries in what critics have likened to essentially selling water abroad since the farmers only pay $20 per acre-foot.
Because water rights were guaranteed to local farmers nearly a century ago, and the current farmers are the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those farmers, they still get to operate under the old agreements guaranteeing them all the water they want, even as reservoirs reach historically low levels.
9. It Takes 3 Gallons of Water to Produce a Single Almond
Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t. But if you do, think long and hard about what that nut costs. Some of our favorite crops absolutely lay waste to water. A single almond requires over three gallons of water to grow. How does the math on that play out?
One pound of almonds is about 400 nuts, give or take. A single tree can produce between 50 and 65 lbs of nuts. So, at 50 lbs, we’re looking at 20,000 nuts. So that’s 60,000 gallons per tree. If an orchard can produce 4,500 lbs of nuts, then it’s using 5.4 million gallons of water to do so. If there are 7,600 almond farms in California each growing about that much then that requires 41,040,000,000 gallons. This is all for almonds, 70% of which are exported.
The amount of water used to grow all the almonds that California exports in a year could ensure water for everyone in Los Angeles for three years. Almonds use 10% of all of California’s water, more than Los Angeles and San Francisco combined.
This may make you look at almonds negatively but remember that even corn uses a lot of water. It takes 110 gallons of water to make one pound of corn. America produced 346 million tons of corn in 2022-2023.
8. Golf Courses Use Billions of Gallons Per Day
If you’re a golfer, you may already be aware of the staggering water usage at most golf courses around the world. But there’s a good chance if you know they use a lot of water, you still don’t know what a lot means. It’s two billion gallons. And while that’s a huge number, it gets so much worse. That’s per day.
There are over 16,000 golf courses in America, more than half the world total, in fact. The average course will use 312,000 gallons per day but desert courses, like those in Palm Springs, can use a million all by themselves.
7. Reverse Osmosis Systems Can Waste Gallons of Water For Every One They Clean
Everyone prefers drinking clean water to sloppy filth so, for some, a reverse osmosis system is the way to go. In your home, these systems force water through a membrane that separates H2O from other molecules and gives you snazzy, clean water in the end. They work as advertised and you will get the clean water you want. The problem is the waste.
Different systems will have greater or lesser success but even the best systems can waste as much as 5 gallons of water for every clean gallon they produce. Some studies have shown that a reverse osmosis system can waste 20 times as much water as it can produce. Newer models claim to offer 1:1 technology but they are harder to find and definitely cost more.
6. Up to 37 Gallons Go Into Making a Single Roll of Toilet Paper
Toilet paper is one of the most bizarre products in the world. You pay good money for it, and these days you pay a lot, knowing full well exactly what’s going to happen to it sooner or later. While TP is king in North America, many places elsewhere choose bidets. Some Americans argue that’s a waste of water, but is it? Is there an upside to toilet paper?
Toilet paper use in America is the equivalent of pulping 15 million trees. Worse, it requires 473,587,500,000 gallons of water to make that paper, or about 37 gallons per roll. A bidet would not, in fact, take up 37 gallons to reach the equivalent cleaning power of one roll of toilet paper.
You use about one-eighth of a gallon with a single bidet use, meaning 296 squirts before you reach the water used to make one roll of toilet paper. And, keep in mind you still need to flush the toilet paper which, even with a low-flow toilet is 1.6 gallons. You’ve just added 473 gallons to your toilet paper waste if you’re matching those 296 bidet uses.
5. It Takes 17 Million Barrels of Oil To Make Bottled Water Bottles
The numbers behind how wasteful bottled water is are pretty remarkable. For people who have no access to clean water, bottled water is a literal lifesaver. But for the rest of us, it’s hard to make sense of the obsession when you break it down.
About 25% of bottled water is tap water, the company just bottles its own municipal supply. That doesn’t mean it’s poor quality, but it does mean you can save a lot of money just by drinking tap water. Coke and Pepsi both bottle tap water that has gone through some filters but there’s never been a study suggesting bottled water is healthier, safer, or even cleaner than most tap water. In fact, the filtering to make bottled water removes minerals like calcium and magnesium, making bottled water less healthy.
Despite the fact it offers little, Americans bought nearly 16 billion gallons of bottled water in 2022. Ignoring the other facts, making bottles for water also uses 17 million barrels of oil per year. That figure was from back in 2006, too, and consumption has increased dramatically since that time so oil use likely has as well.
4. Chocolate Requires More Water Than Nearly Any Other Crop
We touched on the water needed to grow almonds and corn and even make toilet paper, but what about chocolate? Surely chocolate hides no terrible, wasteful secrets. Alas. This one’s going to be ugly.
Everyone has heard that raising cattle is wasteful in terms of resources. It takes 1,910 gallons of water to produce a pound of beef. But chocolate? That requires 17,196 liters to produce a kilogram. That’s about 4,542 gallons per kilogram which works out to just over 2,000 gallons per pound. So a cow and a Hershey bar take roughly the same investment in terms of water. One single chocolate bar is going to require up to 2,000 liters or 528 gallons.
3. Hand Washing Dishes Wastes More Than 5 Times The Water of a Dishwasher
How do you do your dishes? Your options are basically limited to handwashing in a sink or using a dishwasher. If you have a dishwasher, you’ll be happy to know it’s the far better option if you have an eye to water conservation. If you load it properly and make sure it’s full, your dishwasher uses 5 to 7 times less water than hand washing.
When you wash in the sink, you could be using up to 20 gallons. A good, energy-efficient dishwasher will only use four gallons. Other sources suggest hand washing can use as much as 27 gallons while a new model dishwasher may use as little as three. Obviously, there’s a lot of wiggle room here based on how you wash dishes and what kind of dishwasher you have. That said, over the course of a year, a good dishwasher can save 5,000 gallons.
2. Starbucks Used to Waste 6 Million Gallons a Day For No Reason
If you’re the type of person who already doesn’t like Starbucks then this one will hit home for you. Back in 2008, it was discovered that Starbucks was wasting six million gallons of water every day because they forced employees to keep a sink running non-stop as a time saver.
The sink, called a dipper well, was the one employees used to rinse off utensils. The infinite wisdom of Starbucks management was that, if the sink never stopped running, it couldn’t build germs and was, therefore, more sanitary. Staff was literally forbidden from turning the water off.
When a UK paper learned of the running tap, they started contacting various Starbucks branches to ask about it and many of them didn’t know what the sink was for and never even used it, but they all kept it running as per company policy.
Experts were also quick to point out that keeping a sink running would have no impact on sanitation and there are countless ways to keep a place clean that don’t require wasting 6 million gallons of water.
1. Cruise Ships Dump 150,000 Gallons of Sewage into the Ocean Daily
Who doesn’t love a cruise ship? Aside from the people who have had to poop in bags, or been stranded, or endured a viral outbreak? They have all the amenities of a hotel but they’re on the water and, you know, they also dump massive amounts of sewage into the ocean.
It’s been estimated that a 3,000-person ship will dump around 150,000 gallons of sewage into the ocean every week. One vessel managed to drop 74,000 gallons in a day.
Governments often ban the dumping of waste, including sewage, in coastal waters but that’s just in coastal waters. These are cruise ships. They wait until they hit international waters and then the toilet gets flushed. It’s not just sewage, either. The vessels produce much larger amounts of gray water from showers and laundry facilities, as well as oily bilge water, all of which gets dumped into the sea.