A GOOD visualization

I love visualizations.  Here is another good one from GOOD.is.  It illustrates the water consumed by everyday items and actions, both actual water used (i.e. flushing a toilet) and virtual water used (a steak uses lots of virtual water because it had to eat lots of grain which takes lots of water).

I have recently developed a coffee habit.  One cup a day, black.  I was doing tea for a couple of months.  I would have at least a three cups of tea per day.  I enjoyed using the same tea bag twice, but I would add a second tea bag (of the same or different type) to get more flavor after the first cup.  Looking at the graphic, it appears that my coffee habit (per cup) uses over 4 times the water that tea does.  Maybe I should wake up with a tall glass of wheat beer in the morning (only 20 gallons of water vs coffee’s 37 gallons).

Also interesting to note, is that producing one pound of beef takes 1,500 gallons of water.  Claims vary widely on this, but the idea is the same:  it takes a lot of water to produce beef.

Here is another article from the Economist that deals with the same issue of producing goods and water.  I love the Economist by the way.  Whenever I have a flight, I try to pick up the latest issue.

The intent of both of these articles is the same:  true sustainability must account for the life cycle costs of all items that our processes consume to manufacture and distribute those resources, not just the direct costs .  We could design the most sustainable office building in the world, but if it was 50 miles from any of the occupants (and assuming none of the occupants use mass transit), the benefits would be lost because of the transportation impacts of the occupants commuting to and from the building everyday.

LEED has received a lot of criticism in the past for not taking into account more of these hidden costs, such as transportation.  However, the USGBC is looking to change that in future versions, further solidifying LEED’s place in sustainable design.  LEED is consensus based and because of that the users (us as a design profession) can shape LEED into what we want.