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Your last sentence is true, but somewhat irrelevant IMO. That is, even if it takes 1,000x as much water to grow a tomato as ends up in the final tomato, that's
by gnicholas 4y ago
Your last sentence is true, but somewhat irrelevant IMO. That is, even if it takes 1,000x as much water to grow a tomato as ends up in the final tomato, that's all a sunk cost. That water was going to be used either way in order to make ketchup.
The question is: can we recapture some of the water that would have otherwise been wasted in the tomato processing/ketchup producing step?
If we can, and as long as doing so doesn't take undue resources (electricity, etc.), then it makes sense to capture the water, right?
- jefftk 4y ago> If we can, and as long as doing so doesn't take undue resources (electricity, etc.), then it makes sense to capture the water, right? Whether it's worth capturing depends on how much water is worth. At 100x it's very hard to have a water price low enough that growing tomatoes is cost effective but high enough that it's worth putting in this kind of effort to recapture 1% of the water from their production. (Part of the problem here of course is that agricultural water is rarely traditionally "priced")