It takes 2700 liters of water to create the typical cotton t-shirt. That’s enough drinking water to last one person two and a half years.
This month, we’re exploring the environmental and social impacts of the fashion and textile industry. We’ll follow a t-shirt through its life cycle, from its raw materials to what happens when you get rid of it.
What is “fast fashion”?
Novel Hand Intern Brylie recently wrote about fast fashion:
“Fast fashion is a business model where trends in fashion (which are coming and going faster than ever) are quickly mass-produced and sold at a low-cost. It relies on the instant replication of catwalk and Hollywood trends, which are then made available to the masses with lowered prices.”
We’ll start with the production process, which can be quite resource-intensive. Specifically, textile production requires a lot of water.
The fact that it takes 2700 liters of water to create the typical cotton t-shirt is a problem because of the lack of freshwater available for all life on earth to survive. Two point five percent of the earth’s water is freshwater, but most of that takes the form of ice caps and glaciers, so it’s not accessible for us to use– leaving less than one percent of the earth’s water for all of life on earth. In a world where 844 million people lack access to clean water, how we use freshwater is critical. And that’s not to mention that much of the world’s cotton is grown and irrigated in dry regions like Egypt and the Xinjiang province of China.
What happens to this water after the production process? Of all industrial water pollution, 20 percent comes from garment manufacturing.
Other materials that your clothes might be made of aren’t quite as water intensive– for example, producing a polyester t-shirt requires less water than a cotton t-shirt does. But the environmental impacts of fashion production go beyond just water usage. Synthetic fibers like polyester have a larger carbon footprint than cotton does. For example, a polyester t-shirt has a 12.1 pound carbon footprint, mainly created while textiles are dyed and finished, while a cotton t-shirt has a 9.5 pound carbon footprint.
Obviously, we have to wear clothing. And many things that we do each day, like driving a car, have an environmental impact. But the current environmental impact of the clothing and textile industry is outsized, contributing more to environmental harm and climate change than many other industries.
Next week, we’ll learn about how clothing production affects people.
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