Save water: Change what you eat
Each year, the average Australian uses about 120,000 litres of water for things like showering, washing, cooking and drinking. It might sound like a lot but that’s just the start — we use around nine times as much as that indirectly, through the food we eat.
That’s because huge amounts of water go into growing food. Producing a kilogram of beef doesn’t just require water to process and package the meat, it also requires water for the cow to drink as it grows, and, even more importantly, water to grow the grass, grain and the pellets the cow eats. When all of this is added together, producing one kilogram of Australian beef can require 17,000 litres of water. The amount of water that goes into making something is known as embodied water, and also as virtual water or embedded water.
Reducing your beef and dairy consumption will save thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of litres of water every year. You can’t assume that water you save will automatically end up back in our river systems, but you can be part of the shift towards more sustainable agriculture and more sustainable lifestyles in Australia.
Get the full story in our embodied water fact sheet
