Water footprint
The intention of calculating the water footprints was to influence the ecological consciousness of the students. The aim was to make them consider their own water consumption and to teach them to see how their choices and habits affect their water use. Comparing the consumption of each participating country aimed to let the students find a wider perspective and make them think about the differences of the results and this way teach them more sustainable and responsible ways of water consumption. The calculation of water footprints will be repeated at the end of the project to see if the project has influenced the water usage of the project participants.
All the project participants used the same online calculator to make the results comparable with each other. The calculator we used was watercalculator.org. The aspects that all the students and countries considered were average personal water footprint of the students (table 1) and average household water consumption of the students' families (table 2). Table 3 shows the direct comparison of all countries' footprints.
Do you want to find out about your own water footprint and consumption habits, visit watercalculator.org?
Table 1: Average personal water footprint of the students, by country (2020).
Table 2: Average household water consumption of the students' families, by country (2020).
Table 3: Comparison of personal and household water consumption of the participating countries (2020).
The diagrams show that Spain spends the most water when the whole household consumption is counted, but Finns have the highest personal water consumption. Finns also have the second highest household water consumption. The lowest household water footprint can be found in Greece, and Germans had the lowest personal footprint with 4,512 litres. The difference between the lowest (4,512 litres in Germany) and highest (5,247 litres in Finland) personal water consumption was 735 litres which means that German students use 14% less water than Finns.
The difference between household water consumption was highest between Spain (26,460 litres) and Greece (16,710 litres); here, the difference was 9,750 litres which means that Greek households use 37% less water than Spanish households. The difference especially in the household consumptions between the countries is significant. However, it must be noted that the size of the households is not known and it may influence the interpretation of the results. Also, main factors of water consumption were searched for. The main factors were non-vegetarian diet in Germany and shopping habits of clothes in all the countries.