Water is intended for living beings or devices?
DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH WATER IS IN MANUFACTURING OF SMARTPHONES AND LAPTOPS?
Water is an essential resource; it is used for crop irrigation, fuel processing, in factories, and for drinking water, among other resources. The global population is expected to reach 11 billion by 2100. Water demand is expected to exceed current supply by 40% by 2030, putting additional strain on water resources around the world. We know and understand that there are many aspects to the lifetime emissions of smartphones and laptops, which are broadly classified into four categories: mining, manufacturing and distribution, usage, and end-of-life. Water is widely used in mining and manufacturing, and as the number of smart devices increases rapidly, the effect on the water table is becoming problematic.
VIRTUAL WATER
Water in the computer or smartphone usually indicates that the technology will no longer be usable. Virtual water in the PC and smartphone, on the other hand, gives an impression of how much of the rare commodity was spent from planning to completion.
The amount of water that can be allocated to a product during production after a thorough analysis is known as virtual or latent water. This is approximately 100 liters per dollar in the United States, 50 litrs in Western Europe, and 20 litres in Asia.
Depending on the source and type of water supply, different types of virtual water are included in the calculation. Different types of virtual water are:
Blue Water Footprint: The amount of surface water and groundwater required to produce an item.
Green Water Footprint: The amount of rainwater required to make an item.
Grey Water Footprint: The amount of freshwater required to dilute manufacturing wastewater in order to maintain water quality as determined by state and local standards.
The goal of the water consumption breakdown is to have a transparent balance of water consumption and to mitigate future water shortages through the wise use of water.
SMARTPHONE WATER USAGE
The water footprint of smartphones is caused by the virtual water used in their manufacturing, also known as the “grey water footprint.”
Phones are made up of many pieces that are assembled in multiple steps, each of which uses water. Smartphone manufacturing requires a wide range of resources, materials, and parts, including rare earth metals (e.g., lithium), tin, glass, and plastics. The supply chains for these materials reach all the way to Indonesia, the Philippines, and China. Mining for precious metals, creating synthetic chemicals for glue and plastic, and assembling and packaging are all examples of production steps. The water used in each step adds up to form the blue water footprint.
Furthermore, the manufacturing of the parts generates wastewater, which is discharged into nearby waterways. These waterways frequently have pollution limits that manufacturers must meet before they can discharge their wastewater into the waterway. The water used to clean and dilute the wastewater contributes to the grey water footprint, which, in the case of the smartphone, accounts for the majority of its total water footprint.
Making smartphones requires massive amounts of water, which must be filtered and cleaned before use, consuming massive amounts of energy. Imagine how much water is used each year to manufacture billions of new phones if each smartphone requires 13 tons of water to be manufactured!
LAPTOP WATER USAGE
When a laptop is manufactured, it consumes a small amount of several natural resources. Some of these are in plentiful supply, but they are all limited. When the scale of global manufacturing is considered, the previously mentioned small amounts of minerals and metals appear to be quite significant.
Another factor to consider is the extraction, refining, and manufacturing processes used to convert these raw materials into laptops. Every new laptop emits slightly more than a third of a tonne of CO2, and it takes approximately 190,000 litres of water, a vital natural resource, to extract and process those materials.
