A cotton T-shirt takes roughly 2,700 litres of water to produce

sjunginma 24 days ago |

The “criticism” of the cotton sector for its, er, “excessive” water consumption has time and again been debunked as being without basis and without evidence. Worse, this argument has been flagrantly perpetuated by AI companies.

https://texfash.com/special/cotton-s-water-myth-busted-new-g...

Kranthi’s findings, published in the latest edition of the ICAC Recorder, argue that public perception of cotton's water use has been shaped by flawed metrics that fail to distinguish between water sources. Natural rainfall, which accounts for 75% of cotton's total water footprint, is an uncontrollable environmental factor that crops naturally utilise as part of their growth cycle.

jerlam 24 days ago |

The founder of Soylent came to the conclusion that having polyester shirts bulk-purchased directly from China, and donating them instead of washing them, was the ecologically sensible thing to do:

Thanks to synthetic fabrics it takes less water to make my clothes than it would to wash them, and I donate my used garments.

https://web.archive.org/web/20161104001753/http://robrhineha...

Discussion at the time (2011): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9996038

This also may be satire.

maxglute 24 days ago |

Typical shit

Cotton: About ~1500 litres if you exclude rain.

Polyester~30 litres (inclusive entire extraction chain).

Another way to put it:

Cotton: 750 almonds

Polyester: 15 almonds

5-250 California almonds

ThrowawayTestr 24 days ago | |

I'd rather have a good cotton shirt than a bag of almonds.

maxglute 24 days ago | | |

I'm not knocking on consumer choice. I'd rather have 5 high performance synesthetic petchem shirt summoned from fossil than a nice cotton shirt that emits more and sheds more microplastic. More to point out how stupid agriculture water use can be. Also golf courses.

GuestFAUniverse 24 days ago | | |

What microplastic is in pure cotton? My best shirts lasted two decades. 100% cotton. Not mixed fabric or even elastan.

How much water gets contaminated forever with microplastic due to the BS mixed fabric hype?

maxglute 23 days ago | | |

Pure cotton uses 50x more water / pesticides and associated damage to water table. Sure it's more transient but we know pesticides is bad, we _think_ microplastics is bad, but only in the vague, it upsets the environment in some systemic way, not heavy water and pesticide use wall definitely fuck up some local balance way.

Highend synthetic tech fabric will mechanically outlast a cotton shirt. This not even debatable outside of anecdotes. We KNOW with certainty material properties, synthetics can be significantly - not even in the same realm - more hard wearing than the best cotton. Manufactures just cheap out, like they do cheap cotton.

ThrowawayTestr 22 days ago | | |

I don't wanna wear plastic

dahrkael 24 days ago | |

so now plastic is the greener choice? what a time to be alive

maxglute 23 days ago | | |

I think tstill more emissions per shirt, more microplastics, but in terms of water use, more green.

memjay 24 days ago |

And people complain about AI water usage