7 water footprint facts about cotton
Cotton accounts for 40 percent of all textile products made each year and carries a heavy water footprint. It’s a fiber we haven’t yet been able to replace. There’s quite a bit of talk about organic cotton, but that’s far from being widely available, much less affordable. And the fact is, organic cotton still uses quite a bit of water for growing and just as much water as conventional cotton for production.
We thought it was worthwhile to take a look at just how much water it takes to produce this season’s fashionable jeans and the rest of the cotton textiles consumed each year.
The best study on the water footprint of cotton consumption we’ve found was conducted in 2005 by the UNESCO Institute for Water Education [download the report as a pdf]. The researchers take a look at the entire lifecycle of cotton and make very interesting points. We wanted to share some of them with you:
- The Aral Sea lost 80 percent of it’s volume due to water being diverted for cotton upstream.
- Nearly 70 percent of the all cotton is grown in China (25 percent), USA (17.8 percent), India (10.2 percent), Pakistan (9.5 percent), and Uzbekistan (6.1 percent).
- Cotton crops in China rely completely on irrigation–severely depleting and polluting fresh water supplies.
- Cotton is planted on 2.4 percent of the planet’s arable land, but accounts for 24 percent of all insecticides and 11 percent of global pesticides.
- While 60 percent of the nitrogen applied to cotton fields is removed via harvested seed cotton, 40 percent of it remains behind, mostly in the local fresh water supply.
- 2.6 percent of the global water footprint is used to grow and process cotton each year.
- 44 percent of the water used for growing and processing cotton is exported.
What does this all mean to you and me? Well, it means that, with the movement of the cotton around the world, the people who bear the brunt of the water consumption are not benefiting from the products. And you don’t need a study to tell you that the cotton jeans you just bought for $38.95 at the GAP didn’t account for the costs to process the contaminated water downstream or for communities to find new sources of fresh water.
It’s likely that one day we will have to pay for the entire water footprint of that pair of jeans or cotton sheets. We sure hope that by then, we’ve found a sustainable substitute for cotton.
