From Carbon Footprints to Water Footprints

Raisio, a Finnish food company, this week added a label to packages of its Elovena oat flakes to show how much water was used to make the product. Over the last 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. Proponents of water footprints caution that more work is still needed to ensure that consumers have comparable information from product to product. Ms. Mestre said a group called the Alliance for Water Stewardship, which includes her organization, the World Wildlife Fund and the Pacific Institute, was focused on developing such a formula...NYTimes