ISO 14046. Water Footprint Calculation

A few days ago, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) approved the first standardized international standard for calculating the water footprint in organizations and products, the new ISO 14,046, issued by the international technical committee on Environmental Management ISO/TC 207, after 4 years of work.

The standard emerges as a response to the special reception given to the international market by the emergence of the concept of water footprint, born in 2002 as a concept developed by Professor Arjen Y. Hoekstra, a visionary of the UNESCO Institute for Water Education, with the original intention of verifying the real impact of human activities on the water environment, seeking to have a better vision of current problems such as the scarcity of this resource and its pollution, so that it would be possible to improve their understanding and subsequent management.

Although the water footprint was originally designed to model water consumption and movement at an international level, from a global point of view, in the end it has become a tool of special interest to companies and organizations, who have used it as a means to define impacts, mainly of their products.

Applied to these products, such as water consumption per functional unit, the water footprint can provide an idea of the real dependence on water resources of a given product, as well as its true impact on one of its main raw and auxiliary materials throughout its life cycle: water.

The main companies and corporations have also become aware of these facts and have begun to integrate the water footprint not only in their processes of analysis and initial evaluation of their products, but as a fundamental part of their integrated management.

Major brands such as Coca-Cola, L'Oréal, Heineken, Levi's, Unilever, Nestlé, etc., have already developed water fingerprints for their products, integrating water as a fundamental factor in their business management, and are acting accordingly. In addition, several organizations have also wanted to adopt this analysis model to enhance the evaluation of this important environmental aspect, generating different currents of interpretation and development that have ended up generating their own indicators.

For this reason, at Ideas MedioAmbiental, we view with special interest and enthusiasm the emergence of this new ISO standard, which was created with the main objective of standardizing the evaluation of the magnitude of the impacts of products, processes and organizations on the water environment, throughout their entire life cycle, and which we are sure will become one of the most calculated and widespread ecological footprints in the coming years.

All that remains is for AENOR to translate it into Spanish, something that is expected to happen over the next two months, for additional standards to be drawn up for its practical application, as ISO 14,073 is expected to do, and for third parties to be accredited to certify this “new life cycle analysis tool”.

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