As Company Labels Water Footprint, Standards Needed

The NYT's has an interesting post today about a Finnish food company, Raisio, rolling out the first ever "water footprint" label on the packaging of its oat flakes. The post titled, "From Carbon Footprints to Water Footprints," raises the profile of virtual water and reinforces the notion that water really is the new carbon.

According to the NYT's:

Over the past couple of years, the idea of reporting carbon footprints for various products, as a way of allowing consumers to make informed choices about the items they buy, has gained wider acceptance. Now there are signs that other indicators — including water-use footprints — appear to be coming into the mix.

The label used by Raisio indicates the water that the plant uses for growth and production, as well as what’s discarded as wastewater. The company said it was “the world’s first food company to add an H2O label to product packaging” and that it had developed its own calculation model because no internationally established formula and product label yet exists.

While this is certainly a good first start, there are a number of problems with a company rolling out a water footprint label without an international standard--or any established standard--for quantifying the water embedded in products. For instance, you might notice in the image of the label above that 99.8% of the products water footprint is from rainfall. This draws attention away from the water used for processing and packaging materials, making it appear as if the product's actual water impacts are minimal since most of the water embedded in the product was simply natural rainfall (if you can't see the image, click here). As one reader noted in the comments:

"I think it is a bit silly to include rainfall into such metrics. Clearly the inclusion of rainfall is intended to dwarf processing and packaging components. I hope that they included rainfall on timber areas required for the paper production for the packaging piece. A more reasonable approach would be to use only added irrigation water."

Without an established standard in place, comparing water footprints between products will be like comparing apples to oranges because each company might take a different approach to determining their water footprint. In addition, there are other factors that should be taken into consideration. As Christina Mestre from the Nature Conservancy explains:

“While it’s great to see this one company take proactive steps to be transparent and to draw attention to their own water footprint issues, we need to ensure that there are consistent standards across the board...At the same time, water footprinting doesn’t paint the whole picture...it doesn’t measure the sustainability of the water source.”