[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
Let’s say you have a gallon of water. Maybe it was easy to get, maybe it was hard to get, maybe it was expensive, but it’s yours.
You drink half of it. You can understand why that’s not useful anymore. You can understand why that half gallon is gone. It’s pee now.
Sure, we could filter it or let it evaporate and turn into rain, but it’s not in the “drinkable water” part of the water cycle.
Now let’s dump the second half into the ocean. It’s still part of the water cycle. It’s not *gone*.
It just doesn’t do you any good.
And if you need more, you need to do whatever you did to get that first gallon. Maybe that means finding it usable in nature, transporting it elsewhere or maybe that means filtering or desalination.
There’s a lot of water on earth. Not a lot of it is fresh, easy-to-get and clean. That’s why it’s a problem if humans collectively use more than can be easily replenished, and why there is concern about which uses of water are reasonable or wasteful.
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