You hear a lot about sustainability, and while I understand the impact of shipping & transit, I am confused about the other aspects of how the clothing industry can be so wasteful.
For example, how can a single pair of jeans take 1,800 gallons of water? Both the actual how, and how do we measure this on a single unit basis?
In: 2
By looking at the raw materials
Generally the majority of water usage in a process that uses plant material is from growing the plants
Rough numbers here at that growing Cotton takes 6 MegaLiters/Hectare (6,000,000 L/Ha), and you get 2-4 tons of cotton per Hectare so Cotton requires 1,500-3,000 liters of water per kilogram of cotton harvested
From there you just track how much cotton needs to go into a pair of jeans, and the water consumption of any processing stages like prepping the cotton or dying it.
We don’t measure these things on a per unit basis, we look at the total inputs to the process and the total outputs. If making 1 million pairs of jeans takes 1.8 billion gallons of water then each pair of jeans took 1,800 gallons of water even if trying to make just one pair of jeans all by itself would have required more.
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