Why do we need so much water to produce everything?

Question

For example, i’ve read somewhere that we need around 3,7Litres of water to produce a single cigarette and 2700Litres of water to produce a single t-shirt. Why do we need so much water to produce stuff?

In: 96

Answer 1

I worked in the cotton industry a many years ago and irrigated cotton required 6 megalitres of water per hectare to grow a crop. Probably still something like that. In freedom units that’s 2.47 acres to the hectare. And gallons are meaningless but there’s 2.5 megalitres in an Olympic sized swimming pool.
In other words, a hell of lot of water.