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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As others have said, most of these are based off the amount of water used to grow the crops. When you see these numbers for meat, it is mostly the water to grow the plants used to feed the animals. Non-organic products is mostly the water actually used in the process of making said item.
Of note, cotton is a very water intensive crop. It’s also a CO2 intensive crop. Even more so when produced organically.
So in all of these water usage questions, the process of production needs to be considered
We need a lot of water to grow plants and plants are needed for those products. We also need a lot of water for many industrial processes.
This water is often rain water or underground water or river water that are not treated for human consumption. Those source of water are often plentiful, also a lot of water is rapidly returned where it came from. For example, many industrial processes will rapidly return the water, just a bit warmer, often cleaned up by filtration. Plants return the water by evaporation and the water will fall back in rain not to long after. Water is not exhausted by those processes.
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.
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