Water: Abstraction vs leakage

Together, these companies abstract almost 14.7 billion litres of water every day to supply homes and businesses across England and Wales.

At the same time, they lose almost two billion litres of treated drinking water every day through leakage before it reaches customers. The figures show why abstraction licensing, leakage reduction and river protection must all be addressed together as climate change increases pressure on water resources.

Image and quote from this post. Worth noting the 14.7 billion litre total in the quote covers all the water companies in their full dataset, not just the eight shown in the chart above, so the two don’t map onto each other exactly.

I doubt I’m the only person whose response to their water company emailing them and asking them to conserve water isn’t polite. And that was before I knew about the abstraction licences. The waste figures are higher than I’d imagined too.

Sigh!