[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
You can think of it the same way to think of food. Say you have an apple, then you eat it. The material that made up the apple isn’t gone, your body is using some of it and it will expels the parts it can’t use, which will then be used by something else. But the apple as it existed before as usable food *is* gone. It’s the same with water; it still exists but it’s no longer in a usable state. Sure the water will continue through the cycle, but the process takes time. If the rate of fresh water usage is faster than the rate at which a fresh water source is replaced, you could be- to use an ironic phrase- left up a creek.
Even if it goes in a cycle, that cycle only goes so fast, and it stops working if you change or disrupt that cycle. It’s also possible to remove water *from* that cycle.
When you pump hundreds of millions of gallons of water out of the local river or lake to irrigate crops, you’re disrupting that cycle. Normally, all that water would stay in the river and make it’s way downstream. But because you took it and used it to water crops, all that water is now soaked into the ground or locked up inside the cells of the plants you grew, and it can’t make it’s way downstream. That means there is less water in the river to evaporate, which means less rain, which means the river gets lower, which means less water to evaporate, which means less rain, which means…
It could also mean the river straight up never makes it to the ocean. The western states use up more water from the Colorado river than there ***IS*** in the river, so nowadays the river runs dry long before it reaches the ocean. This also disrupts other cycles because now tons of nutrients that previously would get transported into the ocean via the river are not making it there.
Imagine if you had a pool, and it pumps the water out of the pool, through a filter, and back into the pool. It’s a cycle. If your neighbor comes along and takes a few thousand gallons out of your pool to water his lawn… That cycle is gonna be disrupted.
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