Water
Use of water

17 Everyday Items That Use a Whole Lot of Water

Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

17 Everyday Items That Use a Whole Lot of Water

If you live in the West, particularly in California, where Gov. Jerry Brown has ordered a 25 percent mandatory reduction in household water use, you may have started taking shorter showers. Perhaps a spiky array of cacti now dwells where your lawn used to be. Maybe you've even stopped drinking almond milk.

But even those of us who don't live in California are thinking more about how much water our lifestyles require—after all, much of the country is now in drought, and climate models project that dry spells will become more and more common all over the world in the years to come. A few years back, we crunched the numbers on the water footprints of a few common items:

Icon credits (via Noun Project): Microchip—Rabee Balakrishnan; Apple—Ava Rowell; Beer—Fabian Sanabria; Wine—Philippe Berthelon Bravo; Can—Blaise Sewell; Coffee—Okan Benn; OJ—Blaise Sewell; Diaper—Isabel Foo; Chicken—Ana Maria Lora Macias; Cheese—Elliott Snyder; Hamburger—Pei Wen (Winnie) Kwang; T-shirt—Sergi Delgado; Paper—Evan Udelsman; Beef—Jon Testa; Jeans—Pranav Mote;

Additional reporting done by Jen Quraishi
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GABRIELLE CANON ... Editorial Fellow Gabrielle Canon is an editorial fellow at Mother Jones. She has previously written for LA Weekly and the Huffington Post. Follow her on Twitter @GabrielleCanon. www.gabriellecanon.com RSS | TWITTER