ClearWorld Media

We recently got our business cards back from the printers and we’re pretty happy with the results!

The concept behind the cards is a nice touch. We figured that printing up batches of personalised cards for everyone in the office would most likely be a waste, since you rarely go through all your cards. The solution was to print only standard information - street address, Facebook & Twitter handles, etc. on the back, and ”______@clearworldmedia.com” on the front. That way, we can give everyone the same card, yet it can be personalised. The response has been great so far!

While this was an environmentally conscious decision, I still think it’s a great idea. Right now we have 3 designs, and we’re printing more in the next few weeks. New design options coming in month to month, lower environmental and financial costs… sounds like a good deal to me!

They’re printed on off white, heavy paper, and another small batch on textured paper. Rather than a coloured logo we decided to go with a more subtle deboss. 

To celebrate World Water Day on March 23rd the ClearWorld Media team decided to cook a low-water intensive meal, and calculate the total amount of embedded water in all the ingredients we used.

Before deciding on the menu, we had to make a very important choice. Will there be any meat dishes, are we sticking vegetarian, or are we going all out with a vegan menu? We decided on the middle path.

Taking meat off the menu easily reduced our embedded water footprint. For instance, it takes 15415 litres of water to produce a kilo of beef, while it only takes 214 litres of water to produce a kilo of tomatoes. That one kilogram of beef uses more water than the four-course meal with alcohol we prepared.

We began our night with a nacho platter with melted cheddar cheese with a freshly made salsa with tomatoes, chives, lime and saltine crackers with cream cheese sprinkled with dill. We washed this delicious appetizer with a couple of Chinese brewed beers.

For the main course,  we made a Thai green curry with aubergines and red peppers. When choosing the staple to accompany it we took into consideration this fact: It takes 2497 litres of water to produce a kilo of rice, where as one kilo of bread can be produced with 1608 litres of water. So we chose naan bread to accompany our Thai-curry.
We served a Mediterranean salad loaded with feta cheese, green olives, lettuce, tomatoes and cucumbers. For a beverage, we uncorked a couple of bottles of red wine.

And a dinner party is not complete without dessert. A simple recipe of fresh strawberries and whipped cream topped off our culinary adventure of embedded water consciousness.

Our estimation is that we consumed about 12.5 kilolitres of water for a dinner for 7 people, an average of 1.79 kilolitres per person.
We made the compromise of excluding meat, but serving dairy products, and drinking alcohol which accounted for more than half of the embedded water. A vegan meal is by far the most water responsible. Billions of people are affected by water scarcity, and this dinner party was a great exercise in appreciating how much of this precious resource goes into producing the food we eat everyday.

Interested to know your water footprint?

Check out this interactive website. Here are our estimations and calculations per ingredient…