How is water used in the U.S.? What percentage is used by agriculture? How does that break down by crop? What industries use the most water? How about households not counting water used on their behalf in agriculture and industry, but rather water measured at the meter?
I tried googling this, but I mostly got a bunch of “Americans are greedy bastards” links.
Thanks,
Rob
Wikipedia might give you a good start
Most people don’t have any idea what kind of water use could be assigned to them ‘per capita’ for agriculture and industry. If they’re metered, they know how much their household uses. If they’re not metered, they don’t even know that.
And really, you can only estimate what kind of water use is done on your personal behalf. You can get closer to estimating your household use with things like this.
This USGS report has some information on water use from 2000. For example:
It may not be broken down in quite the same categories you asked about. It does, however, what uses the most water and includes an interesting chapter on trends in water use from 1950 to 2000.
Also found this at AWWA’s drinktap.org:
Another no-cite entry…in 1990, the San Francisco Chronicle published a bit where it worked out to 70% agricultural, 20% industrial, and 10% residential (still true, for all I know). This only applied to the NoCal/Bay Area watershed, which gets a lot from the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, IIRC. The inspiration for the story was complaining from Bay Area city dwellers about onerous household water-use restrictions. (Wasn’t that bad, really; just take quick showers, load the toilet tank with bricks, and pee in the backyard. You get used to it!)