The production and lifecycle of pasta ingredients involve significant water usage and expenses. Salt extraction uses water to create brine, which in turn dissolves the salt and forms caverns in salt beds.
Life and Water Cycle of Pasta
Total water used: 54000 L/year
Total cost: More than $2 million
Olive Oil
Olives are hand picked from olive
trees or are picked off the floor
after they have fallen. This requires
no money and the trees require a
normal amount of water.
The olive harvest generally starts in late September and continues through January. There are both traditional and mechanical methods of harvesting the olives, both of which are still used by Colavita. The fallen olives drop into nets that are placed around the foot of the trees, crated and then transported to the olive mill as soon as possible to minimize damage and bruising. Once delivered to the mill the olives are cleaned and prepared for extraction.
Colavita: The trusted family brand
Employees have benefits and are
respected. They have normal
amounts of vacation and says of
days off.
Salt
Mining Salt
The salt is extracted by using water to pressure the salt into dissolving, turning the water into brine and creating a cavern in the salt-bed. They use around 2300L a day and get this water from the lakes.
The average cost to make a salt is $75 for 22178g of salt.
The average monthly cost that price works out being for a fairly average tank size at a hundred gallons that gets ten percent water changes four times each month for a total of 40 gallons change
The water footprint of pasta is around 54,000 litres/year. In relative terms, this is about 2% of the average person’s water footprint (2330 m3 /cap/yr).
The 1/3 pound of pasta that’s about a normal serving takes 633 liters of water to produce. And the jar of pasta sauce takes about 200 liters to produce, so that would be about 75 liters of water for this meal. If I choose to have a snack of a small bag of M&Ms for dessert, that takes a whooping 750 liters of water to produce. Say I have to wash dishes afterwards, I probably use another 50 liters of water to wash everything. On an average day, a person using a normal flush toilet uses 75 liters of water a day on flushing alone, plus 10 liters or so washing his or her hands. So that's another 85 liters.
Eggs
For pasta, you only need 2 eggs. If we multiply the total with 0.166 (2/12) the total cost for 2 eggs is $164.
In this case the for the Supplies for brooder are $98, feeding the chickens are $87, the total coop cost is $530, grower feeding is $99 and Laying pellets is $168. This all totals up with $982 for 12 eggs.
So, after 18 weeks, we’ll assume our hens have started laying. We’ll have to switch them to layer feed, which runs about $13.50 per 50 pound bag. Now, once chickens reach adulthood, they only need about 1.5 pounds of food per week, per bird. That means our three chickens will eat 4.5 pounds of feed per week. That means for the first year of life, they’ll only need 153 pounds of feed (34 weeks x 4.5 pounds of feed). For the rest of the three year life cycle we have planned, that equals out to 468 pounds of food, for a total of 621 pounds of layer pellets through our three chickens’ egg laying career.
China ranks highest in egg production at
5.6 billion kilograms of unprocessed,
in-shell hen's eggs produced annually.
Flour
Then it is ready to be transported to the bakery or other stores. The transportation takes about 200L to make the amount of gas to transport the flour. The water footprint of dry pasta is equal to that of the semolina it is made from, 1924 litres/kg.
wheat grains need to be processed into flour. About 72% of the original durum wheat weight becomes flour; the rest consists of the wheat bran and germ. The wheat constitutes 88% of the total value of the two separate products. Given a total water footprint of wheat of 1574 m3 /ton, we can calculate that the water footprint is 1924 m3 /ton. The total cost of the transportation is about $300 for a week. This factory is located Poplar Farm, Upwell Rd, March PE15 0DP, United Kingdom. First, they clean the wheat with more than 200 L of water. Breaking the wheat down using water to generate steam for the generator to run.
They harvest the wheat using a machine called the Combine Harvester. Energy companies used nearly 250 billion gallons of water to extract shale gas and oil from hydraulically fractured wells in the US between 2005 and 2014, a new study finds. During the same period, the fracked wells generated about 210 billion gallons of wastewater. Then the wheat is ready to be grounded and is transported to a factory that is close to the farm.
Based on the average N fertiliser application rate, an assumed leaching percentage of 10% and a nitrogen water quality standard of 10 mg/l, the grey water footprint of durum wheat is estimated to be 301 m3 /ton