#5 The Water Footprint of Clothing Consumption

The Jianhe river in China polluted by artificial dyes. Source

I recently came across a group of UCL students that run a project called The Climate Collective. The aim of this project is to personalize climate change by encouraging a global community to share how they have experienced it.

I think the necessity of such a movement essentially reflects the rise of what may be termed a dissociation of consequence. Considering our example of fast fashion, few – if any – consumers perceive the environmental consequences associated with the manufacture, consumption, and disposal of clothing (Birtwistle and Moore, 2007: 214; DEFRA et al., 2008: 26, 40). The reason for this, it seems to me, is that environmental impacts appear in places far away from where the eventual product is bought. But indeed, looking good is actually bad for the planet.

Take a look at the infographic I made below:

While this infographic tells a dismal story about production, it says little about the environmental footprint from a clothing consumer’s perspective. The distinction is important, so lets take this concept further. To do so, I will be focusing this analysis on water scarcity.

Freshwater Boundary

Steffen et al. (2015) define the planet’s freshwater boundary as the maximum rate of blue water that is taken out of a river, which may be a bit higher or lower depending on how much water is needed to sustain the river’s ecosystem.

Mekonnen and Hoekstra (2016) integrate this measure into their approach, and crucially, they add a new factor to the analysis. By accounting for the spatial and temporal variations in water consumption and availability, they find that around 4 billion people face water scarcity for at least 1 month per year. The figure below depicts the annual average of blue water scarcity, where areas in orange and red(s) face ‘significant’ and ‘severe’ scarcity issues, respectively. 

Source: Mekonnen and Hoekstra (2016)

This is important: Mekonnen and Hoekstra have added a human dimension to an environmental issue that is intrinsically human in cause and consequence. They highlight that the direct victims of water overconsumption are “the users themselves, who increasingly suffer from water shortages during droughts, resulting in reduced harvests and loss of income for farmers, threatening the livelihoods of whole communities.”

This introduces a new level of severity when considering the effects of unregulated consumption of blue water: not only is it to the detriment of planetary boundaries, but it also carries real social consequences. A notorious example is the Aral Sea, which has nearly disappeared due to cotton farmers drawing excessively from Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers, endangering the lives and livelihoods of those dependent on it.

So, we now have evidence to uphold our first assertion that the social consequences of excessive production appear in places where cotton is produced. But we’re still talking in terms of water scarcity due to production, what about scarcity due to clothing consumption?

Rethinking Water Consumption

In the context of equitability and sustainability, it isn’t useful to talk about actual water use, which is undoubtedly higher in countries that depend on irrigation to support an agricultural economy.

But consider this: if it takes 2,700 liters of water to produce 1 cotton shirt, and this cotton shirt is exported to Europe, then in effect Europe has ‘imported’ 2,700 liters of used water.

This example essentially describes what is known as the international flow of ‘virtual water’ (Hoekstra and Hung, 2002), where virtual water refers to the volume of water used to produce a commodity (Allan, 1997). Rethinking water use in this way allows us to make statements about water use due to clothing consumption in a nation.

Hoekstra et al. (2005) summarize their findings of the water footprint in EU25:

Note: Dilution water refers to the amount of water required to 'dilute' harmful chemicals (e.g. pesticides) used in the production of clothing to acceptable standards. Source

The consumers in EU25 countries collectively consumed around 17 Gm³/yr of water relating to cotton products alone. Around 3.6 Gm³/yr of this virtual water originates from Uzbekistan. Since Uzbekistan uses around 14.6 Gm³/yr of blue water to irrigate cotton fields (Hoekstra et al., 2005: 15), it can be extrapolated that EU25 consumers are indirectly responsible for a quarter of the desiccation of the Aral Sea.

Of course, it is rather contentious to talk about water footprints in this way (or at all for that matter, but this is beyond the scope of this post). It is however useful in stimulating the debate of water scarcity from the viewpoint of the clothing consumer. By considering the international flow of virtual water, it becomes possible to link (over)consumption in one area to impacts in another. Perhaps, then, we should add to Mekonnen and Hoekstra’s recommendation of putting caps on water consumption by river basin, by placing caps on virtual water import by nation!

Although, I doubt this suggestion would fare well with both economic liberalists and fashionistas alike…