Global water and your cotton tee shirt

With hundreds of thousands of environmental groups worldwide and in this space age of the internet, its sometimes disappointing to note how little attention is paid to the textile industry and its montrous impact on the planet’s water.

I put the blame on the fact that non of us are willing to acknowledge that we as green minded as we say we are, that if we acknowledge being a part of this monster, that it will somehow discredit the labels we have given to ourselves as friends of the earth, savers of the planet, lovers of the ocean and warriors for rainforests.

Yet,the facts are indisputable and it doesn’t take an industry expert or insider to find out about the environmental damage caused by textiles, in particular, water pollution which is a very visible factor.

Taking the world’s most popular fibre as an example, we will examine the impact of cotton on the environment. Starting with the cultivation of the cotton fibre itself. The amount of cotton used in a single tee shirt consumers up to 1700 litres of clean water and this is only in its cultivation! The natural flows of rivers and streams in cotton growing countries like India,China,Egypt and Uzbhekhistan have been diverted to feed this thirsty crop. Uzbhekistan in particular holds top honors as its cotton fields turned the world’s 4th largest lake into a salty puddle today. Note that organic cotton uses the same quantity of water to grow. Environmental impacts like these have caused many to challenge cotton’s claim as a sustainable fibre,including this incident where the UK ruled that the US cotton council’s advertising of cotton as “sustainable” was misleading.

From there, the the thirsty cotton tee continues to waste another estimated 1000 litres of clean water in order to process the cotton balls into the tee shirt you’re wearing today.Faced with accusations of irreparable damage to the environment, the cotton industry has responded with a limited use of closed loop production where the waters used in its processes are cleaned,filtered and in some cases,even reused but this process has yet to make a meaningful impact on its overall harm as its too expensive to implement and the net gains are neglible at best. Oeco Textiles, a third party certification group lists a whopping 2000 chemicals in use as part of the process of making textiles. How can you clean the waters when there is that much chemicals in use?

You can’t. This is why rivers in China run blue from denim factories along its banks. The Yamuna River in India also has clothing factories to blame for its toxic waters. Waters so high in toxins its not even considered suitable for farm irrigation. China has recognised the dirty nature of the textile industry and has in recent years, abandoned its policies of supporting this one product that helped it build its massive economy. When over 1 billion of us does not have access to clean drinking water, now is the time to rethink what we’ve done.

So what can we, as tree huggers, ocean lovers and planet savers do to reduce the impact of cotton? Buy less or if you have to buy a new tee shirt, look for one that has a reduced water footprint. Recycled cotton fibres is a fairly new product that has a greatly reduced water consumption. It may not have the sleek handfeel of combed cotton but its definitely not the water hog that virgin cotton is.