Danu Water

The Water is Right

Which of these giveaways took the most water to make?

Line them up at our table from least to most, then check your order here.

From least to most water

Water taken in to make each item, from raw materials to the finished freebie. Rounded, and some are ranges.

    How did you do? Pen and stress ball at the bottom, tote at the top? Then you've got the big picture. The middle four are close enough that we count any order as right.

    The showcase: the canvas tote

    Write your guess on a card at our table first. Closest without going over wins a tree planted in their name each day.

    About 200 litresour best estimate for this tote (somewhere between 100 and 400 L)

    The tote ~200 L

    Everything else on the table, combined ~35 L

    The "green" alternative to a plastic bag took more than five times the water of everything else on the table put together. Cotton is thirsty to process: it's washed, bleached and often dyed, and every step uses water.

    That's before counting the water to grow the cotton, which we leave out for every item. Include it, and the tote would be in the thousands of litres.

    What surprised people

    • The plastics came last. The pen and stress ball used the least water. They're still the hardest to recycle: water and waste don't line up.
    • "Eco" barely changed the notebook. The recycled part is the cover. The 60 pages inside carry most of the water, so the eco notebook and the leather-look journal come out about the same.
    • The leather-look cover is plastic. It's polyurethane, not leather.
    • The umbrella was made to keep water off you, and took roughly a bucketful to make. Dyeing and coating the fabric is the thirsty part.
    • The USB stick scales with storage. Memory chips need ultrapure water. Roughly half a litre per gigabyte on older chips, so a 64 GB stick could outdo the umbrella.

    How we worked it out

    We counted water taken in by factories to make each item, from raw materials to the finished product. We didn't count rain used to grow trees or cotton, for any item. These are estimates for typical items, not measurements of the exact ones on our table.

    • Paper: about 34 L per kg, from European paper industry figures (3,326 million m³ of water for 96.7 million tonnes of pulp and paper in 2022). Around 90% of it is cleaned and returned to rivers.
    • Notebooks: 60 sheets (eco) and 80 pages (journal) of 5×7" paper, plus covers. The eco cover is recycled kraft, which we assumed uses less water.
    • Tote: a 200 g canvas bag, scaled from cotton processing water for a t-shirt (about 380 L for 250 g, including the water needed to dilute dye-house waste). An undyed bag is at the low end, a dyed and printed one at the high end.
    • USB stick: 32 GB, scaled from a certified figure of 310 L for a 512 GB memory chip. Newer chips are denser, so we took the lower end.
    • Umbrella, stress ball and pen: rough estimates from material weights. We couldn't find solid published water figures for dyeing polyester or making foam.

    Sources

    Why a water company cares

    Paper mills take in huge amounts of water, use it, clean it and send it back to the river. Chip factories turn ordinary water into ultrapure water and lose a third of it doing so. Danu Water builds adaptive electromembrane separation systems that adjust in real time to the variability of industrial water and clean industrial water so factories can use it again, instead of drawing fresh water every time.

    If you'd like the occasional fact like this one, we send a short newsletter.

    Get the newsletter

    Figures are estimates built from published data and rounded. One bucket icon holds 10 litres.