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?
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In both those examples, those materials are sourced from plants. Cigarettes are filled with the leaves of the tobacco plant, t-shirts are made of the buds of the cotton plant. Growing plants takes a ton of water. Plants need water to grow, but they also lose a lot of water to the air unless they are specially adapted plants like cactus that are good at retaining water. And the plants don’t get every bit of water you put on the soil – a lot of it evaporates into the air from the soil or sinks deeper into the ground.
This is not *necessarily* a huge problem, if you are smart about where you grow your plants so you can take advantage of natural rainfall and/or pull water out of a river or lake that is easily refilled by rainfall and snowmelt. It is a problem in areas like the American southwest however where water is piped in from dams on the Colorado river which simply does not have enough water to meet this demand.
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