Water Crisis vs Sustainable Fashion: Can we Develop New Shopping Habits This Summer?

27 / 05 / 2020

By News 18 - -

The one great realisation many people have had during the COVID-19 lockdown is that with malls shut and e-commerce websites delivering only the essentials, the ‘shopping’ we otherwise do is more about our ‘wants’ than ‘needs’. Fresh priorities are being set and, if you really think about it, we could all do with so much ‘less’ than what we thought we could.

Of course, the opposite spectrum of this exists as well. As observed in many countries where the lockdown was ceased and shops reopened, people attacked the stores and malls with double the ferocity. But if we spend more time making people aware of how shopping for your clothes affects the water crisis, how the textile industry affects the water crisis in multiple ways, perhaps we can observe a change in behaviour.

The mass water pollution caused by textile industries is a well know fact. The synthetic materials used in creating apparel are one of the top water pollutants. The toxic chemicals being releases in water bodies from textile industries also add to the problem. But it’s not just them. Even when we wash clothes at home, we are releasing a lot of micro-fibers in the water, which eventually find their way in the water system through sewers and what not. Dyeing of clothes is also a water intensive process. It is an overall slow burning disaster.

To top that, you’d be astonished to know how much water is consumed in creating the clothes in the first place. A simple cotton t-shirt costs around 2,700 litres of water to manufacture from the scratch. A pair of jeans? Around 750 litres. Need a comparison? That is the average amount of water one average human being can consume for a whole of three years! This should put things into perspective.

We need to take a step back from materialism and figure out the repercussions of our acts that don’t seem serious enough prima facie. The water crisis is real. The fact that the crisis is aggravating is real. Our choices will make a huge difference.