[google is very unhelpful, it’s broken now. I can’t find any posts explaining the specific thing I want to know]
Was asked this question by a friend.
When we say that producing one item of clothing uses x amount of water. She doesn’t see the harm because the water used to grow cotton doesn’t disappear “it’s part of the cycle”.
Pollution must be a factor right? There is a difference between drinking water, saltwater and contaminated water? (Surely they’re not using clean drinking water for production?)
Exasperated by the fact that production is usually performed in areas with poor regulation/infrastructure.
(Is it inherently damaging, or damaging because of how it’s performed?)
Is the water “used” because it becomes vapor? Is it used because the molecules are taken apart? Either way shouldn’t this technically be reversible?
[I am not very articulate, and I find it very difficult to organize my thoughts to words. This question ended up frustratingly inprecise!]
Edit: thanks for the good responses:)
In: Biology
In a very, very, VERY technical sense, your friend is right. But the question is kinda wrong. It’s not “Will the used up fresh water end up beeing usable fresh water again?”, the answer to that is “yes”. The correct question is “**How long** will it take for the water to be usable again?” If the used water spends years, maybe centuries, slowly moving back to the groundwater level, as salt water in the ocean or it just rained down somewhere else where it is not accessible to us, we can consider it wasted. If you use up a water supply in a year that takes a decade to fill up, that’s not good ressource management.
Desalination will (unfortunately, imho) be worthwile at some point in the future. If we’ll using up our available fresh water supply and continue screwing up the planet, 1L of desalinated water will eventually be cheaper than 1L of fresh water.
Also, with your friends logic oil is basically renewable. Just wait until algae absorb all of the emissioned CO2, then wait a few million years until the algae die, get moved down into the sediments and turn into a black goo. Voila – oil again! totaly eco, green and sustainable! s
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