In the Central Valley of California on Interstate 5, yellow signs dot the side of the road. Just off the highway that runs through the San Joaquin Valley, the land has a parched, yellow look to it, and several of the nearby orchards appear dead. The signs read: Congress Created Dust Bowl.
Who actually placed these signs is unknown, but the issue that prompted them is known. It's a problem that Californians have dealt with since the state was first settled-how to get water into places where it's scarce.
For the farmers of San Joaquin, that's no easy task. The region endures intense, arid summer heat. For sweet cherries, nectarines, and other fruits to thrive, they need water and are dependent on California's massive waterworks system that connects rivers, lakes, and reservoirs to canals, pipelines, and aqueducts. Through no small feat of human ingenuity, the system brings life to one of the largest fruit- and vegetable-producing regions in the United States. It's estimated in government studies that nearly 13% of the United States' agricultural production (as measured by dollar value) comes from California, and the majority of that percentage is produced in the San Joaquin Valley.
But there are consequences to hydrating the land. In the past few years, researchers discovered that pumps drawing water into the Central Valley aqueducts were trapping salmon and native smelt fish. The consequences were a drastic decrease in the smelt fish population as well as a declining California fishing industry. When smelt fish were labeled an endangered species, federal limits were placed on water flow to the region's farmlands.
The fish problem couldn't have climaxed at a worse time-central and southern parts of the state were in the grips of a severe three-year drought that led the state's governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, to declare a water emergency and call for a 20% reduction in water use. Those who opposed the government's actions have cited millions of dollars in farm revenue that has been lost, not to mention thousands of jobs, and has led to what some hard-hit farmers in the San Joaquin Valley are calling the Dust Bowl.
The drought has since subsided and officials are revisiting the Central Valley water limitations, but water levels still are not where they need to be. California gets 65% of its water from run-off from the Sierra Mountain snowpack, and climate changes are causing the snowpack to melt more quickly than normal. By 2050, several scientists project that at least 25% of the Sierra Mountain snowpack will be gone.
California isn't alone in its water woes. Florida, for instance, has the challenge of accommodating population growth while still providing sufficient water of good quality to natural areas such as the Everglades National Park. Whether it's drought, ecological imbalance, climate change, or land development, many other states, including Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada, have their own precarious situations, too. Nationally and globally, concern is mounting in both the public and private sectors-who is using water and for what purposes?
Chris Hendrickson, co-director of the Green Design Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, wanted to answer those kinds of questions. The institute promotes green design by forming partnerships with companies, government agencies, and foundations. The goal is to preserve the environment without impeding economic development. It's a tall order that the institute has set out to accomplish through environmentally-friendly and economically-sound design, management, manufacturing, and regulatory processes.
With that in mind, Hendrickson wanted to identify water usage numbers through an environmental life cycle assessment. In other words, how much water does it take to produce everything from food on the kitchen table to the car in the garage? He knew exactly how he wanted the research to proceed-with the Economic Input-Output Life Cycle Assessment method, EIO-LCA for short.
EIO-LCA uses aggregate sector-level data, compiled in large part by the government, to quantify environmental impact. The methodology behind it is based on the work by economist Wassily Leontief from the 1930s for which he received the Nobel Prize in Economics. The Green Design Institute "operationalized" Leontief's method in the mid-1990s, once sufficient computing power was widely available to perform the large-scale matrix manipulations that the method requires. EIO-LCA can transform data into easy-to-understand results-the environmental effect, for example, of producing an automobile, taking into account such variables as mining metal ores, making electronic parts, and forming windows.
But Hendrickson, the Duquesne Light Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, couldn't take on alone the Herculean task of scouring around for reputable water data to feed into the EIO-LCA model. As it turns out, in the spring of 2008, he was contacted by an academic advisor from the Instituto Qu°mico de Sarri† in Barcelona, Spain, who was recommending one of his engineering students, Jordi Sels i Vidal, for a study-abroad opportunity that would enable him to work with environmental issues. Hendrickson welcomed Vidal to come to the institute, which is comprised of faculty and graduate students from the College of Engineering, School of Computer Science, and the Tepper School of Business. Hendrickson laid a few options on the table for Vidal; he chose to take on water.
Delighted to have Vidal on board, Hendrickson asked civil engineering PhD student Mike Blackhurst to join the team as well, knowing that Blackhurst's background as a consultant on a host of water resource issues in Texas and Boston would be beneficial to the project. Blackhurst agreed.
Next came the painstaking beginning. They set out to find water usage data for 426 sectors of the economy, which they could add to the EIO-LCA model. The model would let them see how much total water it takes to make products that are present in the economy, taking into account the journey from raw materials to the factory to the store shelf to the recycling plant. Essentially, they were identifying a product's water footprint, which would enable them to answer questions like how much water does it take to produce sugar? Or, how much water does it take produce $1 million worth of heavy-duty trucks? What products and manufacturing processes demand the most and least amounts of water? Is more water used indirectly than directly in a product's life cycle, in processes like packaging and transportation?
What Hendrickson thought would be a two- to three-month side project bogged down. Statistics on water use weren't readily available-the last national water analysis for the 426 different sectors of the economy hadn't been attempted since 1982 by the U.S. Census Bureau.
Despite the restraints, the team forged ahead. Whereas other EIO-LCA projects had updated and readily available statistics for the 426 different economic sectors, recent totals for water use were available for only nine sectors. Pulling from 40 different sources of government data, Hendrickson's team took the nine sectors and disaggregated them, or broke them down into 426. After nine months of searching and estimating, calculating and recalculating, the researchers were done and could finally review their results.
They found that the biggest water users were agriculture and power generation, using a whopping 90% of all industrial water withdrawals. Some of the numbers for everyday goods like sugar and milk were huge: it takes nearly 280 gallons of water to produce $1 worth of sugar and 70 gallons to produce $0.50 worth of milk.
Those numbers seemed astounding, but Hendrickson, Blackhurst, and Vidal were more surprised by where the water was used: approximately 96% went to indirect purposes. In one real-life scenario, of the 280 gallons used to make $1 worth of sugar, 268 of those gallons weren't used in the sugar cane mills or the refining process, but rather in other sectors in the sugar's life cycle from farm to market, power generation and pesticide manufacturing just to name two.
After compiling their research, the team sent off a manuscript to Environmental Science and Technology, a renowned peer-reviewed academic journal for environmental disciplines published by the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society. The journal accepted the manuscript and published it last winter. The report didn't go unnoticed. In the months that followed, Hendrickson fielded calls from various organizations and media, including the Sierra Club, National Geographic, and The New York Times. In addition, the article was downloaded more than any of the others that were published in the journal in 2010.
All of the public interest further confirms Hendrickson's belief that more and more producers and consumers are becoming aware of their footprints. Major corporations like Coca-Cola and Alcoa have already launched long-term water sustainability strategies for the future. "There's this pervasive concern that this is a resource that we've taken for granted. ... That's certainly the case when you start seeing there's some new demands for water, like the bio-fuels industry, which has quite a demand for water," says Hendrickson.
In that burgeoning industry, the more society starts to replace oil with bio-fuels, the more Hendrickson believes there will be an increased awareness of concern about water use. Businesses, he points out, are starting to consider their water resources beyond the next five or even 10 years, looking at 20-year plans and beyond. Areas where water quantity and quality are issues, or in the process of becoming issues, are not ideal places for heavily water-dependant emerging industries such as bio-fuels to set up shop. India, Bangladesh, and Australia are some of the countries that have less-than-desirable water availability for commercial purposes.
"Companies are beginning to understand that their operations depend on the access to fresh water, and they understand, I think even better than the public understands, we're going to want to drink first," says Jeanne VanBriesen, professor of civil and environmental engineering and associated faculty with the institute. She adds that being able to determine how much water companies and communities are using is one of the first steps in creating sustainability plans for the future. That's where the institute's Web site for the EIO-LCA model can play a valuable role.
Companies can measure their water use footprint by combining the industry-specific totals from the EIO-LCA model with their own analyses of their specific products. Let's say the owners of a coffee business want to figure out how much water it takes to make one cup of coffee in their company; they can visit the EIO-LCA Web site, www.eiolca.net, and plug in their information, choosing options from several categories: year, sector, dollar amount, and water category. After running the model, they'd see a chart that gives a breakdown of the amount of water used in each sector involved in coffee production.
The Web site for the EIO-LCA model has been accessed more than 1 million times on a variety of subjects since it was made available by the institute in 2008. It can be used to find embedded energy and greenhouse gas emissions as well as water use. Hendrickson says it's commonly used for lifecycle assessment research for carbon footprinting and by industries looking at respective sectors.
For water usage, Hendrickson plans to continually update the EIO-LCA model to coincide with the changing economy, and the next extension of his water analysis will focus on water quality. The compilations will continue to be accessible to everyone from homeowners to organizations to public health officials to business sectors. Among those different factions, environmental issues can lead to frustration and anger, not unlike what happened in the California Dust Bowl dilemma of delivering fresh water to farmers without destroying an ecosystem.
In heated, polarized environmental debates that will invariably occur among industries, the government, and the public, Hendrickson says the institute can provide meaningful data beyond the sensationalistic claims. When it comes to water usage, there is one point that he believes has universal agreement:
"Effective water management is critical for social welfare and our fragile ecosystems. You look at the United Nations Millennium Goals for environmental sustainability, and one of the important goals that they put forward is to try and ensure that people around the world have access to clean water."
Danielle Commisso (HS'06) is a regular contributor to this magazine. This is her first feature story.
Related Links:
EIO-LCA: Free, Fast, Easy Life Cycle Assessment
Information for Researchers and LCA Practitioners
Carnegie Mellon's Chris Hendrickson Leads Team Tracking How U.S. Industry Uses Scarce Water Resources
