[chewz]

One cotton t-shirt equals 2,700 liters of water—what one person drinks in two-and-a-half years. Google about Aral Sea.

Cotton farming is also responsible for 24 percent of insecticides and 11 percent of pesticides despite using about 3 percent of the world’s arable land.

https://www.wri.org/blog/2017/07/apparel-industrys-environme...

[jogjayr]

We also need to buy less clothing overall. But this doesn't invalidate GP's assertion that natural fibers are more desirable.

[tluyben2]

Yep, but that requires a big mindset change; the insane amount of 'throwaway' clothes people buy is embarrassing. Not sure how you someone can be proud to own 50 pairs of shoes and 100 different outfits. I pity people who are that shallow (then again, I walk around like a vagrant, that's probably a bit too extreme as well), but it seems to become more normal vs less so as in; less fortunate people can (and do) do this now too. I know women and men in Philippines who make a few $100/month working online and spend almost everything on after market or knock off brand clothes and shoes. My colleague from the Philippines who is a coder and makes a fortune compared to the average there, buys new complete outfits for the wife, daughter and himself weekly (in the weekend they go clothes shopping and then to a family sunday lunch with that); they must have 100s of boxes of unused clothes stacked in their storage room (luckily they have a storage room?).

[Retric]

The water people drink is negligible percentage of overall water usage. Compare a single shower vs a weeks drinking water.

[dungdongdang]

What is the point you are trying to make though? Are you saying to make a cotton tshirt a chemical reaction takes place and 2700 liters of water is destroyed and is no longer water?

The Aral Sea, a place I have visited, was dried up by digging to redirect rivers that filled it to irrigate crops.

Now, let's say they made tshirts instead by pulling the water out of those rivers. They'd make the tshirt, and dump the dirty water. That dirty water would then get cleaned, evaporate and rain into the soil or rivers, or get dumped into a river directly.

Maybe you meant "potable water." Using potable water for tshirts is good - not bad. After making the tshirt, the water is no longer clean. You can't make more tshirts with it, you can't shower with it, you can't drink it. Just like the water in lake michigan where my city gets its water from.

When we need 2700 liters of water per tshirt, we need to make more potable water from the lake. We build bigger industrial cleaning systems. They are more efficient, and the water becomes cheaper. That factory that paid for the extra water, helped pay for those cleaning systems, and made the water cheaper for people.

Now, here's the biggest lie made of eco-spin strawman. The 2700 liters. Most of that is to water the cotton plants, so they can pull carbon out of the atmosphere and give us that sweet oxygen and stop global warming. Are you saying that growing plants is bad because it uses water? Well, let's cut down the rainforest then!! That's a lot more plants than the tshirt water.

As far as pesticides... We're not eating the tshirts buddy. "Pesticide use" is bad because it gets into our food. It's not bad on its own. You know what else kills insects? A bar of soap. If you stop showering you'll save the insects and the water.

[firethief]

I can't tell if this is satire or an extreme example of the logic motivated reasoning leads to

[dungdongdang]

as opposed to the comment I was replying to, which is straight up misinformation to prove the opposite of what is actually happening. so someone who works at fox news.

[ollo]

Producing cotton clothes also releases more CO2.

[dungdongdang]

fortunately producing the original cotton plants those tshirts are made from captures hundreds of times more CO2 from the air. you know, because they're plants.