A new concept was put to the consideration of the community and the researchers in charge of looking for better possibilities for the care of natural resources and the reduction of energy consumption, it is the Water Footprint.
The best known for now is the carbon footprint, however, there are two others that are vital for the development of actions aimed at improving eco-friendly practices.
According to chemical engineer Bárbara Civit, a researcher at the Institute of Human, Social and Environmental Sciences of the Mendoza Scientific and Technological Center of Conicet, "the idea of sustainability is based on ensuring that available resources are not consumed faster than they are renewed and that waste and emissions are not released faster than they can be absorbed by different systems."
The specialist, who is also part of the Cliope scientific group of the Mendoza Regional Faculty of the National Technological University, which researches on energy, environment and sustainable development, explains that various indicators have been proposed to quantify the sustainability of a product, an enterprise or an activity and that "among them, the concept of footprint as a quantitative measure of the appropriation of resources by man.
So far, the ecological footprint, the carbon footprint and the water footprint have been defined.
The ecological footprint relates the consumption and emissions that occur as a result of human activities, with the surface of the planet that is needed to provide consumable resources and absorb the emissions and waste generated.
Carbon is intimately linked to greenhouse gas emissions and climate change, and is defined as the net amount of greenhouse gases emitted by a product, individual, organization or nation over a period of one year.
"The water footprint is, of the three, the most recently defined, and refers to the calculation of the total volume of water consumed or contaminated - directly or indirectly - per unit of time, to produce a good or a service, or consumed by an individual, a community or a factory," says Civit. The concept is analogous to that of the ecological footprint, but quantifying water instead of productive surface.
The researcher reveals that "this mode of calculation has made it possible to determine, for example, that drinking a coffee well is equivalent to consuming 140 liters of water, or that eating 1 kilo of roast represents drinking 16,000 liters of water, because all the water used in the processes involved in the product supply chain is taken into account."
