By Anna Brones

As human beings, we need water to stay alive. We consume, cook and clean with it on a daily basis. But our water consumption isn’t only on account of keeping us hydrated; virtual water is embedded in many of the products that we encounter in our everyday lives. Nowadays, the environmentally conscious love to discuss their carbon footprints, but less discussed, and equally important, are our water footprints.

The concept of a water footprint hasn’t been around for long. Coined in 2002 by A.Y. Hoekestra from UNESCO’s Institute for Water Education, the term refers to the “total volume of freshwater that is used to produce the goods and services consumed by an individual, business or nation.” Turns out that the products essential to our livelihood, like food and clothes, account for significantly more water consumption than drinking, cooking and cleaning with the resource combined.

One of those products is cotton. Comfortable, versatile and popular the world round, the natural resource that accounts for 40% of textile production has been deemed the “fabric of our lives.” Unfortunately, cotton is a water intensive crop, requiring 11,000 liters of water (the global average) to produce 1 kilogram of final cotton textile. That means that for an average cotton shirt that weighs 250 grams, 2700 liters of water must be used to produce it. To put that number in perspective, think about a quart-sized Nalgene bottle; almost equal to a liter, to produce one cotton t-shirt you need about 2700 of them. Seems like a lot doesn’t it?

Being a water intensive crop, cotton has serious effects on the environment. Only about 27% of cotton is grown under rain-fed conditions, meaning that most cotton is harvested by way of irrigated fields, which can lead to greater waste because of seepage, evaporation and poor water management. Intensive irrigation schemes have serious implications for the environment like in Uzbekistan, where diversion of water from the Aral Sea in for cotton irrigation is considered one of the most significant contemporary ecological disasters.

Organic cotton has been touted as a solution to the environmental problems posed by conventional cotton, and water usage is no different. Because organic production replenishes and keeps the soil healthy, organically grown cotton does not necessitate the same irrigation systems required by conventional growing methods. Instead, because of the organic matter kept in the soil it is grown in, organic cotton retains water more efficiently. Although organic cotton comes with its own list of questions, in regards to water usage, it’s a better choice over the conventional version.

Water depletion is only the beginning of conventional cotton’s problems. In the U.S. alone, conventionally grown cotton is still one of the most chemically sprayed crops, accounting for about 4.5 pounds of pesticides per acre of cotton that can easily seep into streams, rivers and even municipal water supplies. More cotton crops not only means a larger water footprint, but that footprint in turn translates to a higher risk of dangerous agricultural by-products affecting the quality of the water that we are in contact with everyday.

But our cotton consumption isn’t only responsible for affecting the environments which we are directly in contact with. In fact, most of the effects of water footprints are felt far away from the people creating them. In the European Union 84% of the cotton related water footprint lies outside of the EU. This makes European consumers heavily dependent on the water resources of other producing countries like India, putting a stress on the water available for other purposes in those countries. Problems associated with water scarcity will only worsen; according to the World Health Organization, by 2025 nearly 2 billion people will be living in countries or regions with absolute water shortage. You do the math to figure out the real effects, short term and long term, of your cotton tee.

In the U.S., the situation isn’t much brighter. The global water footprint related to the consumption of cotton products is about 43 cubic meters per year per capita whereas for Americans it is 135 cubic meters per year, and about half of that comes from the use of external sources. Add those figures to other statistics, and as a global average, 44% of the water used for cotton growth and processing is serving exports instead of domestic markets. In other words, nearly half of the water problems in the world related to cotton production can be attributed to foreign demand for the resource, dumping environmental problems attributed to the manufacture of goods not on the people purchasing them but those producing them.

What’s the bottom line when it comes to cotton? Before you buy that cotton t-shirt, keep in mind what your water footprint is, and who and where the production of your purchase is really going to affect. Because ultimately, that water could be used for other things.

Sources:
Water Footprint Network
Organic Trade Association
Organic Exchange
World Health Organization

[Photo via: Robyn Gallagher, Flickr]