Our waterways are becoming more and more polluted due to PFAS, plastics, medicines, drugs, and new chemicals made by companies that just hand over the responsibility of cleaning to plants paid for by public moneys. Detecting the different chemicals and filtering them out if getting harder and harder. Could the simple solution of heating up past a point where even PFAS/forever chemicals decomposes (400C for PFAS, 500C to be more sure about other stuff) be alright?

  • atro_city@fedia.ioOP
    2·
    20 hours ago

    Based on this, 4 oz of cheese uses 450 liters of water.
    https://foodprint.org/blog/dairy-water-footprint/

    I always find those kinds of numbers difficult because they include rain water in that estimation.

    For instance, water footprint data shows that the majority of water consumed for feed crops grown for U.S. dairy comes from rain and soil moisture (i.e., green water footprint), but as dairy and alfalfa production shift to Western states that are getting progressively drier, more irrigation is needed to grow those crops. This means a larger share of water withdrawn and consumed from streams, rivers and groundwater (i.e., blue water footprint).

    What percentage of the 450 liters of water comes from those different sources? How impactful is a green water footprint vs a blue water footprint vs a gray water footprint? If the 120g of cheese were made from 100% blue water, that would definitely be problematic. But if it were 100% green water, that would most likely be less of an issue.

    Next, you have to consider how the water comes into the calculation. Is it just considering the water for feed crops of the water that the cow itself consumes? And if it’s feed crops, the type is also important. Some feed is simply the byproduct of crops that are used for human consumption e.g maize only has maybe 10% of its biomass for human consumption. Would simply throwing away the other 90% be considered wasteful or useful? And how does that factor into the water calculation?

    And a final point regarding feed, is what kind of feed it is and where it’s grown. Feed may not only be byproduct of human comestible crops but also crops that cannot be consumed by humans at all, and they can also grown in places where human comestible crops cannot be grown.

    Now you have to compare that water for server farms. I have little knowledge thereof, but my guess is that they don’t wait for rain to cool their servers and it probably is more blue water than not. It maybe as entangled and complicated as the source of water for cheese, I don’t know.

    My point is, it’s not an apples to apples comparison. Water consumption doesn’t always equal water consumption. To drive the point home, would you consider the water required to raise fish in a landlocked country the same as that of a coastal country?