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.

“If I had a million dollars, I’d…” Many a wistful and wishful discussion begins with some version of that sentiment, uttered with the understanding that we’d put our good fortunes to good use. We’d travel, we’d invest, we’d retire. We wouldn’t, say, have a jewel embedded in our skull or fund hamster fights, to preview two of the following fiscal fiascos.

From the profligate to the unprofitable to the just plain stupid, here are ten examples of money most of us would have spent far more responsibly.

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10 Dunce of Diamonds

Any sentence that references rappers and jewelry is likely to detail a questionable-at-best expenditure, but this one takes the cak… uh, carat: Rapper Lil Uzi recently had a $24 million diamond implanted in his forehead.

His reason? He was worried that he’d misplace the jewel were it set in something more conventional, like a ring. So basically a guy who couldn’t trust himself to hang on to a $24 million ring trusted himself enough to have a $24 million diamond sewn into his head.

According to Simon Babaev of New York-based jeweler Eliantte & Co’s, Lil Uzi’s big diamond is secure because jewelers created a “specific mounting that clips and locks in place.” Instead of using stainless steel or surgical-grade steel, Babaev said the team did everything with precious metals. “There’s a whole mechanism involved, it’s not a standard piercing. A specific piece and part were both engineered with millimeter precision to get this put on him,” he said. That’s a lot of brainpower for something so brainless.

Reassuringly, Babaev insists that an expert team put their heads together before Gorilla Gluing a jewel into this humble gent’s head. “We made sure that prior to getting anything done that Uzi brought someone in to consult on everything. We didn’t just do this randomly.”

And don’t worry, said Babaev: the procedure is not dangerous. “As long as you maintain it well and have good upkeep, it’s perfectly fine. It’s as safe as any other piercing.” Babaev did not comment on the “safety” of someone inevitably cutting Lil Uzi’s head open while he sleeps to steal a $24 million diamond.

9 Brazil’s Ghost Stadium

The world has no shortage of poorly conceived stadiums. In England, libraries could be filled with the amount of copy dedicated to trashing London Stadium, home to the West Ham football club. Florida’s Tropicana Field is home to the Tampa Bay Rays, who play baseball in a domed stadium whose roof isn’t high enough for pop flies and is painted the color of (you guessed it) a baseball.

However, the most monetarily moronic venue in the world might be Brazil’s Arena da Amazonia. Conveniently located in the middle of the Amazon, the venue was constructed in advance in the 2014 World Cup at a cost of about $300 million. Testament to the country’s exemplary safety standards, three workers died during construction, which took an onerous four years.

Arena da Amazonia was used for four matches during the World Cup, then a few more soccer matches for the 2016 Summer Olympics. Since then, the 40,000-seat stadium typically draws fewer than 1,000 spectators for local matches. Its operating costs outpace its revenue more than threefold.

Arena da Amazonia certainly isn’t alone in its status as a money-wasting sports venue built to host a lone international event. Other such prestige infrastructure that now sit largely unused include Montreal’s funds-depleting Olympic Stadium and Beijing’s gaudy Bird’s Nest, the primary venue for the 2008 Summer Olympics.

8 Rodent Wrestling

For more than two decades, researchers at Northwestern University in Illinois received National Institutes of Health funding to watch hamsters fight each other. The project – which is probably even cooler if you’re stoned – was reportedly granted more than $3 million, including over $300,000 in 2015 alone. That’s a hell of a lot of rodent royal rumbles.

Some of these highly educational (and even more highly hilarious) experiments have involved a sort of home turf ‘roid rage test: hamsters were injected with steroids, then had another hamster placed in his cage to see if the drugged rodents were more aggressive when protecting their territory. In other contests, a teetotaling hamster was pitted against a combatant shot up with cocaine.

Other tests investigated whether becoming a “trained fighter” through two weeks of face-offs made the critters more aggressive. The study led to one of the greatest thesis headlines in academic history: “Prior fighting experience increases aggression in Syrian hamsters: implications for a role of dopamine in the winner effect.”

The experiments ceased after animal activists with no sense of humor pressured the university to eliminate the program. Unfortunately for the coked up hamsters, no funding was available for rodent rehab.

7 Crippling College Debt? Thy Name is Mudd

As in Harvey Mudd College of Claremont, California.

The two most expensive universities in the United States are (1) the University of Chicago and (2) Columbia. Both are top-ten academically accredited “write your own ticket” institutions, meaning a degree from either gives graduates such tremendous advantages that shelling out north of $300,000 for a four-year diploma turns into a sound investment.

The third most expensive college is another household name instantly recognizable for its academic excellen… oh wait, sorry. It’s Harvey Mudd College, a $79,539-per-year institution of higher learning that few people have ever heard of.

Granted, Harvey Mudd College has a specialty: its curriculum focuses largely on science and engineering. Still, plenty of colleges with more recognizable names offer such programs, without the risk of a would-be employer glancing at a graduate’s resume and thinking: “he went WHERE now?”

An honorable mention goes to Scripp’s College, an all-women’s school whose $77,588 annual tuition makes it the sixth most expensive in America despite a similar lack of notoriety.

6 A Legendary Box Office Disaster

In 2017, Warner Brothers Studios released “Arthur: Legend of the Sword,” an epic fantasy action/adventure film directed and co-written by Guy Ritchie. A tribute to the famous king and his Knights of the Round Table, Legend of the Sword was intended as the first of a six-movie series.

The goal was Fast & Furious on horseback – a Medieval answer to lucrative, long-running cinema franchises. To launch the endeavor, Warner Bros. gave Ritchie and his filmmaking team a long leash: a whopping $175 million production budget.

Critics weren’t sold. Legends of the Sword sports a dismal 30% approval rating on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, whose critical consensus reads, “King Arthur: Legend of the Sword piles mounds of modern action flash on an age-old tale – and wipes out much of what made it a classic story in the first place.”

The moviegoing public concurred. On its debut weekend in the US, Legends of the Sword finished third among all films, taking in just $15 million across 3,200 screens. That’s a lot of empty thrones in the theaters. The studio ultimately recouped just $25 million from its investment, making Legends of the Sword the most money-losing film of all time.

Rounding out the top three historic movie money-losers are (#2) 2003’s “Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas,” which lost $125 million; and (#3) 2012’s “John Carter,” which lost $122 million.

5 Dumpster Diving for Dividends

In 2013, James Howells, an IT worker living in the UK, was cleaning out his house. He had two identical hard drives, and figured he could stand to part with one. He drove to the landfill in Newport, South Wales and discarded it.

Howells was an early adopter of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. Amassing 7,500 bitcoins when it was new and inexpensive, he’d stashed his crypto-cash onto a hard drive as an investment. Fortunately for Howells, by 2013 each bitcoin was worth $17,000, meaning he was cyber-sitting on a nest egg of over $125 million.

Unfortunately for Howells, the cryptographic “private key” needed to access his bitcoin windfall was in… you guessed it… the hard drive he’d just dropped at a landfill.

Eight years later, Howells’ trashed trove is worth an eye-popping $280 million. To this day, local authorities have refused his pleas to search the landfill in search of his buried treasure, citing environmental and funding concerns. Attempting to alleviate the latter issue, Howells has offered to donate 25% of the haul — some $71 million — to a “Covid Relief Fund” for the city if he manages to dig up the hard drive.

As of late January, the Newport City Council has rejected Howells’ nine-figure scavenger hunt, with no signs of budging. “The cost of digging up the landfill, storing and treating the waste could run into millions of pounds, without any guarantee of either finding it or it still being in working order,” a town council spokesman said. Howells, it seems, is shit-coin out of luck.

4 So Dumb They Made It A Day

The most celebrated day in American sports is April 15. That’s the date in 1947 that Jackie Robinson took the field as a Brooklyn Dodger, breaking baseball’s color barrier and truly making the game America’s national pastime.

The most mocked day in American sports is probably July 1. That’s the day that, each year, the New York Mets pay a player more than a million dollars… despite the fact that he hasn’t played a game this CENTURY.

The story goes like this: By 1999, the Mets had pretty most had it with Bobby Bonilla, a big-money bust who never lived up to his hype. The team decided to part ways with the aging third baseman, despite still owing him $5.9 million for the upcoming 2000 season.

But instead of simply buying out his contract and being done with him, the Mets opted for an arcane agreement in which payments would be deferred until 2011, as if $6 million would make or break a franchise worth half a billion bucks per 2002 figures.

The deferment included an 8% annual interest accruement. As a result, Bonilla has received about $1 million each July 1 – known throughout baseball as Bobby Bonilla Day – since 2011, and will continue to receive annual instalments until 2035. Upon the deal’s completion, Bonilla will be 72 years old and the Mets will have paid out nearly $30 million to defer $5.9 million.

3 Bloomberg or Bust

It was late 2019 and, in the US, things weren’t going well for the Democratic Party establishment. The assumed frontrunner, former Vice President Joe Biden, was underperforming in both debates and polls, opening the door for Socialist Bernie Sanders to have a path to the presidential nomination.

So onto the political scene strode a towering 5’6” billionaire: media magnate Michael Bloomberg. So centrist that he was a Republican during his three terms as mayor of New York City, Bloomberg devised an unconventional primary strategy: not to compete in the four states with February primaries, but rather focus on Super Tuesday – a date in early March when more than a dozen states vote.

What followed was the most saturating media blitz in the history of politics, American or otherwise. Bloomberg spent $188 million in the 4th quarter of 2019, including $132 million on television ads and $8.2 million on digital platforms. By February, the price tag had exceeded HALF A BILLION dollars – easily the most expensive primary campaign ever.

Unfortunately for Mayor Mike, no one was buying it. Bloomberg finished no higher than third place in any of the 14 Super Tuesday contests, and suspended his campaign shortly thereafter. In the apportioned system of Democratic primary voting, that gave Bloomberg a pathetic 58 of the 1,991 delegates needed to secure the nomination. That translates to
$17,241,379 per delegate.

2 Fast Track to the Poorhouse

In 2008, California announced an ambitious project: a decade-long infrastructure initiative to link its two most prominent cities, Los Angeles and San Francisco, by high-speed rail. The effort was intended to provide an eco-friendly alternative to flying between the southern and northern hubs of the expansive state, and to help close the bullet train gap between the US and other developed nations.

The 2008 price tag was eye-popping: $33 billion, with service commencing in 2020. Cost-benefit questions abounded, including the wisdom of a high-speed rail station in Los Angeles, the most spread out and therefore car-centric city in the country.

Of course, 2020 has now come and (thankfully) gone, with no high-speed rail service in sight. California being California – a red-tape draped state where committees, permits and legal entanglements cause notorious delays – the project’s estimated cost now exceeds $100 billion, with an uncertain completion date.

That works out to about $192 million per mile for the 520-mile rail service. This for a project with no easily-converted customers – Californians have little history with rail ridership, precisely because of the state’s enormity – in a state that is currently $575 billion in debt.

1 A Trillion-dollar Paperweight

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a… wait, yeah it’s a plane. Only it doesn’t go anywhere and cost more than a TRILLION dollars to develop. In late February, the US Air Force admitted what had long been suspected: a warplane more than two decades in the making was a dud.

In the 1990s, the Air Force began designing a next-generation fighter jet designed to be lighter and more sophisticated than its predecessors. The goal was to replace the existing fleet of Cold War-era F-16 fighter planes.

Then the USA’s notorious military industrial complex happened. Over (far too much) time, the lightweight replacement fighter got heavier and more expensive as the Air Force and lead contractor Lockheed Martin packed it with an endless array of bells and whistles. Twenty years later the slow, clunky 25-ton “stealth” aircraft has become the very problem it was intended to solve.

“They tried to make the F-35 do too much,” under-stated Dan Grazier, an analyst with the Project on Government Oversight in Washington, D.C. The final price tag for this bloated bust approached an astounding $1.7 TRILLION. That’s enough to give each of the more than 330 million living Americans $5,000 in cash.

Up next is more of the same: In a profligate nod to 90s nostalgia, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Brown Jr. just announced plans to design a lightweight fighter jet to replace the existing fleet of Cold War-era F-16s. See ya in 2040, General.

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