Eco Shopping Index

Creating a laptop used the most amount of water out of the consumer goods that have been studied, on average it takes an estimated 50,193 gallons of water to produce a laptop. This is equivalent to 401,544 pints, and as people are recommended to drink 3.5 pints of water a day, the water used to produce one laptop could keep a man well hydrated for almost 115,000 days, or roughly four lifetimes.

The next product that takes a large amount of water to produce is a car. A standard car takes almost 40,000 gallons of water to produce (and some feel this could be a conservative estimate given the products in a car). Although it uses over 10,000 fewer gallons of water than a laptop, it is the second-largest user of water by a big margin.

A smartphone uses an average of 3,400 gallons to be produced, this makes it the third most environmentally damaging product on the list in terms of water used during production. There are 6.64 billion people using smartphones in the world today, which would require 22.58 billion gallons of water to produce, this amount of water could fill a third of Windermere (the largest lake in England). This only accounts for the number of smartphones used right now, as most people upgrade fairly regularly, the total amount of water used in smartphone production will be much higher than this.

The item of clothing that uses the most water to produce is a pair of leather shoes, the production process for leather uses a lot of water as the animal hide is prepared and tanned. Consequently, it takes over 2,100 gallons of water to produce a single pair of leather shoes, and unlike in the past, people will go through many pairs of leather shoes in their lifetimes.

A set of car tyres use slightly less water than a pair of leather shoes during their production, making them the fifth-highest product in the rankings. To turn rubber from a tree into the tyres on a car takes a long process of transportation and manufacturing, and during this vast amounts of water are used. It was estimated in 2017 that there were 1.5 billion wasted car tyres in the world, this means over 4.3 trillion gallons of water are wasted on tyres that are not even being used.