One of a series of Blogs as part of a sustainability study course
Sustainability, society and you: The University of Nottingham
The following comments are based on the results of having completed this questionaire
The country I live in is not on the list. I filled out the form and decided that on the basis that the answer to everything is 42, I would choose the 42nd country on the list, which is Gabon.
I also have to admit that I do not weigh everything I eat; in fact I don’t even record everything I eat. I have better things to do in my life. I don’t have a stop watch running on my daily shower, I never leave a tap running, I never water my garden, I do not have a swimming pool, I use an eco carwash that recycles the water.
Putting the numbers in to the best of my estimates I get 612, if I lived in Gabon, which I don’t. If I assume that the water footprint of The UK is similar to Ireland I get a number of 333, which interestingly is exactly half of 666. (so only half a devil then)
I would be interesting to know how the calculation of water usage for toilet flushing was arrived at. Is it based on the amount of kgs consumed and how often one would need to defecate to get rid of that amount of kilos and how much water is required to move that weight to the waste water treatment station. Who calculated the number of flushes required and the distance?
No mention of how many pints of beer I might consume in a week, how many soft drinks I might have or for that matter how many pints of water I might drink.
No question of how many pets I have in my house (Just 1, favourite number 2 daughter’s cat) or if I have any form of water capture for my roof runoff.
I sincerely hope that the people organising this questionnaire were not getting paid for their effort because as far as I am concerned, the numbers generated are as relevant as the significance of the number 42 I used to find my chosen country. Of course things may be looked at differently in Holland ( no question of the amount of water used to produce and use certain types of substances)