[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
Only about 2.5% of the water on earth is fresh water. Of that, the vast majority is locked up in groundwater, the polar icecaps, and glaciers. The water in the ground mostly stays there for hundreds to thousands of years, and is not particularly accessible to us. So it turns out only a very small amount of fresh water is actually available to us in the form of rivers or aquifers.
What happens when you use vast amounts of water to, for example, irrigate cotton, is that that water ends up a) in the ground, and b) in the oceans. Both are pretty inaccessible. IN ADDITION, the process of doing that washes vast amounts of fertiliser and pesticides/herbicides into both the groundwater and into the oceans. Neither of which is a good thing.
You might reasonably ask why we don’t just desalinate sea water, and the answer to that is that we DO, but it’s an incredibly power intensive, and thus expensive, process. So it tends to be the fresh water resource of last resort, not first resort.
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