Hi guys, this is going to be a very short post on an infographic I made for my Environmental Pollution class on water pollution! To be quite honest, I'm quite proud of how it turned out. If you didn't already know, water footprint measures how much water is used to produce a certain good – the concept is basically the same as carbon footprint, but for water. I wanted to include many more items in the infographic but sadly I couldn't find any:(. So here it is:
As I mentioned in my previous post, cotton is environmentally "better" than polyester in terms of its carbon emissions. However, we can see in the infographic above that a cotton t-shirt requires a lot more water to produce than a polyester shirt – about 5.7x more! This is because cotton is a "thirsty crop".
This can also be seen in the water footprint of a pair of jeans (if you didn't know, denim is cotton-based). However, the reason why a pair of jeans is more water-intensive than a cotton t-shirt is that it takes a lot more cotton to make a pair of jeans than a t-shirt, and also the manufacturing process of denim, which includes dyeing and finishing, requires a lot of water. The denim industry is aware of this unsustainable practice and hence, it is trying to cut down on water waste. Levi Strauss, for example, developed a technique in the finishing process that they claim cuts down up to 96% of water waste.
If you want to know more about water footprint, and if you want to calculate your personal water footprint, you can click this link.
Until next time!
Yours truly,
Katya
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