The average household in the UK uses over 1000 gallons of water a day, making the country one of the biggest water importers in the world, a report claims.
The study by the environment group WWF is the first attempt to discover the full scale of UK water consumption, or its "water footprint".
As well as water for drinking, cleaning and washing, it looks at hidden factors such as how much water is needed to grow food around the world and to make and transport goods.
It concludes that only 38 per cent of the water used by the UK comes from its own resources, with much of the rest coming from countries such as Spain and Morocco, which face serious shortages.
While the average UK household consumes almost 33 gallons a day for washing and drinking, it consumes about 30 times as much in "virtual water", used in the production of imported food and textiles
As well as water for drinking, cleaning and washing, it looks at hidden factors such as how much water is needed to grow food around the world and to make and transport goods.
It concludes that only 38 per cent of the water used by the UK comes from its own resources, with much of the rest coming from countries such as Spain and Morocco, which face serious shortages.
While the average UK household consumes almost 33 gallons a day for washing and drinking, it consumes about 30 times as much in "virtual water", used in the production of imported food and textiles
Those eating meat and dairy foods use more than twice as much water a day as vegetarians.
"Huge amounts of the food and cotton consumed in the UK are grown in drier areas of the world where water resources are either already stressed or very likely to become so in the near future."
WWF identifies Spain, Egypt, Morocco, South Africa, Israel, Pakistan and Uzbekistan as some of the countries facing the worst droughts, yet they still supply the UK with substantial exports of their water.
WWF identifies Spain, Egypt, Morocco, South Africa, Israel, Pakistan and Uzbekistan as some of the countries facing the worst droughts, yet they still supply the UK with substantial exports of their water.
British retailers such as Marks & Spencer are already working with WWF to calculate their water footprint and are auditing key crops such as strawberries and tomatoes to establish where and how they should be grown in the future.
Virtual water = virtual water is the volume of water that is required to produce a particular product. A can of fizzy drink might contain 0.35 litres of water, for instance, yet it also requires around 200 litres to grow and process the sugar that goes into it. A pair of leather shoes may contain no water at all, but it requires 8,000 litres to grow the feed, support the cow and then process its skin before you start wearing the shoes. Add all this virtual water together and you have a water footprint for a person, a business, a community or a country.
In the UK, we consume far more water to support our lifestyles than most imagine - a typical British household uses 30 times as much virtual water as the amount it obtains through the taps for washing, cooking or drinking. When virtual water is taken into account, consumers in developed nations are leaving a large water footprint not just in their own countries but across the globe too. Only 38% of the UK's total footprint, for instance, comes from our own resources. The other 62% comes from other parts of the planet (we are the world's sixth largest net importer of virtual water) . But since water is in many ways a finite and, in some places, a dwindling resource that is also the cause of conflict, this massive import of virtual water too often comes at the expense of people and ecosystems that can ill afford to lose it.
read more from The Guardian
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