«Globally, the blue water footprint (i.e., the consumption of surface and groundwater resources) of food wastage is about 250 cubic kilometres, which is equivalent to
the annual water discharge of the Volga river [in Russia], or three times the volume of [Switzerland's] Lake Geneva.
The study shows that the
annual volume of SGD for the whole Mediterranean basin ranges from 30 to 500 billion cubic metres, which demonstrates that this process is relevant at large scale and its
discharge is similar or up to 15 times greater than that of river
water inputs.