[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
Water usage is about the amount of available clean enough fresh water we can use that is no longer available. If you produce clothing most water is used to irrigate the crops. Most of that water will evaporate and fall down somewhere else as rain.
That the water is on earth is not enough information for the impact of some parts of the earth. Deserts are not a result of not enough water on earth, is is a result of not enough water in the desert. Water is extremely heavy and we use a lot, so long-distance transportation is hard. If the water would need to go up in elevation you would use an enormous amount of energy to pump it up. We use hydroelectric power plants that extract energy from water going down for a reason. So water transportation is quite limited.
Humans tend to live in large cities and we use a lot of water, if water is used upstream and not longer reaches the city it will be a huge problem. It do not help that there is lots of water somewhere else.
That might not sound bad but is can be if for example you use all the water from a river for irrigation and nothing then reach the ocean or a lake. The [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea) was the third largest lake until it started to shrink in the 1960s and today is almost gone. The water that flowed to it was used for irrigation to primarily produce cotton.
The water is not gone it still is on earth and falls down as rain, but is is not longer where it was and a huge ecosystem has been destroyed.
In the US the Colorado River has been used for irrigation. Hoover Dam produces electricity but alos water for irrigation, primarily in Califonia. The result is almost no water in the ocean and it has had a huge impact on the delta there. The water evaporates from the artificial lake behind the dam and from the field it irritates. The result is a huge environmental impact. There are alos large city that use water for the population and a fixed total amount available. So if crops that use a lot of water are grown there is less water available for city usage and to reach the lower part of the river.
Water from rivers are fed by rain and snow so new water is get available all the time. We can use more than what on average fall from the sky in a year. There is alos water in underground aquifers that we pump water from. They can contain enormous amounts of water. The problem is that might be the result of water flowing down from the surface during million of years. We can pump up water thousands of times faster than the aquifer is refilled. So water in aquifers are often a limited resource and when we pump it all up it takes millions of years to replenish. The water still remains on earth but that do not help anyone in a location where the aquifer was the only available source.
So water usage is about where the water is, in a location, there is a limited amount per year or practically forever for som aquifers. Humans use water on an enormous scale and it can have a huge environmental effect and a effect on available water for human consumption.
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