What is a water footprint?

People use lots of water for drinking, cooking and washing, but even more for producing things such as food, paper, cotton clothes, etc. The water footprint is an indicator of water use that looks at both direct and indirect water use of a consumer or producer. The water footprint of an individual, community or business is defined as the total volume of freshwater that is used to produce the goods and services consumed by the individual or community or produced by the business.

Now there are even more reasons to feel guilty about drinking beer. It takes 75 litres of water to produce one 250 ml glass of beer. That is amazing.