One cotton t-shirt equals 2,700 liters of water—what one person drinks in two-and-a-half years. Google about Aral Sea.

Cotton farming is also responsible for 24 percent of insecticides and 11 percent of pesticides despite using about 3 percent of the world’s arable land.

https://www.wri.org/blog/2017/07/apparel-industrys-environme...

We also need to buy less clothing overall. But this doesn't invalidate GP's assertion that natural fibers are more desirable.

Yep, but that requires a big mindset change; the insane amount of 'throwaway' clothes people buy is embarrassing. Not sure how you someone can be proud to own 50 pairs of shoes and 100 different outfits. I pity people who are that shallow (then again, I walk around like a vagrant, that's probably a bit too extreme as well), but it seems to become more normal vs less so as in; less fortunate people can (and do) do this now too. I know women and men in Philippines who make a few $100/month working online and spend almost everything on after market or knock off brand clothes and shoes. My colleague from the Philippines who is a coder and makes a fortune compared to the average there, buys new complete outfits for the wife, daughter and himself weekly (in the weekend they go clothes shopping and then to a family sunday lunch with that); they must have 100s of boxes of unused clothes stacked in their storage room (luckily they have a storage room?).

The water people drink is negligible percentage of overall water usage. Compare a single shower vs a weeks drinking water.

What is the point you are trying to make though? Are you saying to make a cotton tshirt a chemical reaction takes place and 2700 liters of water is destroyed and is no longer water?

The Aral Sea, a place I have visited, was dried up by digging to redirect rivers that filled it to irrigate crops.

Now, let's say they made tshirts instead by pulling the water out of those rivers. They'd make the tshirt, and dump the dirty water. That dirty water would then get cleaned, evaporate and rain into the soil or rivers, or get dumped into a river directly.

Maybe you meant "potable water." Using potable water for tshirts is good - not bad. After making the tshirt, the water is no longer clean. You can't make more tshirts with it, you can't shower with it, you can't drink it. Just like the water in lake michigan where my city gets its water from.

When we need 2700 liters of water per tshirt, we need to make more potable water from the lake. We build bigger industrial cleaning systems. They are more efficient, and the water becomes cheaper. That factory that paid for the extra water, helped pay for those cleaning systems, and made the water cheaper for people.

Now, here's the biggest lie made of eco-spin strawman. The 2700 liters. Most of that is to water the cotton plants, so they can pull carbon out of the atmosphere and give us that sweet oxygen and stop global warming. Are you saying that growing plants is bad because it uses water? Well, let's cut down the rainforest then!! That's a lot more plants than the tshirt water.

As far as pesticides... We're not eating the tshirts buddy. "Pesticide use" is bad because it gets into our food. It's not bad on its own. You know what else kills insects? A bar of soap. If you stop showering you'll save the insects and the water.

I can't tell if this is satire or an extreme example of the logic motivated reasoning leads to

as opposed to the comment I was replying to, which is straight up misinformation to prove the opposite of what is actually happening. so someone who works at fox news.

Producing cotton clothes also releases more CO2.

fortunately producing the original cotton plants those tshirts are made from captures hundreds of times more CO2 from the air. you know, because they're plants.

Buy good quality clothing with timeless styling (not fashionable, or worse fast fashion). Take good care of it. They can potentially last decades if taken care of properly (obviously not cycling the same three shirts every week, but a proper wardrobe that’s seasonal with enough option for any occasion). Goes a long way.

> obviously not cycling the same three shirts every week

Wouldn't the total amount of use you get out of your shirts count? So while only using any single shirts once a year will easily get you decades of use out of them, it's not really beneficial or is it?

Or do clothes get better with resting in between uses? (I heard leather shoes do benefit from a rest.)

I have nice looking shirts (that are hardly dated nor much frayed) from 20 years ago.

I buy all cotton, and organic if I can.

Proper and not too-frequent washing can help.

What makes washing proper (or improper)? How frequent is too frequent?

Machine drying removes a tremendous amount of fibre from clothes, vs. line-drying. That's what dryer lint is. Both tumbling and temperature contribute to wear.

Clothes washing itself as well, though I believe to a lesser extent.

Sufficient vs. excessive laundering helps greatly.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1999/08/990831080157.h...

Cold or warm wash, don’t overagitate air dried helps a lot.

I think most people don't have enough money for a "proper" wardrobe.

It's not a binary thing. Within any budget you can move towards more or less 'proper'.

However, there are also trade-offs with convenience. Basic cotton t-shirts are so cheap, that it can be worth it for some people to not bother taking care of them and just replacing them more often.

Cotton and wool are totally in style, not sure why they wouldn't be? I'm slowly eliminating polyesters from my wardrobe. If you like the feel, you can do rayon or other processed natural fibers.

Rayon is still incredibly toxic to produce because of the process.

How so? Carbon disulfide is rather nasty, but it's straightforward to recover most of it. TLV is 10 ppm, while the effluent air from Teepak is 100 ppm [0], meaning you could spend hours a day with just over a 10:1 dilution of the factory exhaust. And there are lots of efforts to get those emissions way lower.

If it means less microplastics, I'm all for it.

[0] https://www.osti.gov/biblio/5518183

Tencel brand is a closed-loop version of the lyocell rayon process.

Are you saying cotton and wool aren't stylish? My wardrobe is exclusively cotton, linen and wool. I don't know (m?)any people who wear mostly synthetics. Maybe garment fabrics vary more by region than I'd assumed.

If anyone looking for a particular brand - I swear by Icebreaker - mostly for underwear, base layers, hoodies and sweatpants, but others like tshirts. Allbirds is another one but they are unreliable and too warm for summer.

I thought cotton was pretty much the default fibre?

Nope, especially not the cheap Walmart clothes. Most fabrics are at least 60% polyester

Oh, ok. Walmart doesn't exist in any countries I lived in, so I can't say.

I buy most of my very limited wardrobe at Muji at the moment. But even growing up poor in Germany, it was mostly cotton everywhere as far as I remember.

(Another commentor pointed out apparently female clothing has more polyester.)

I assume you shop in the dude's section. In the dudette's market there is polyester everywhere.

I guess for female clothing I mainly only have exposure to the higher quality stuff, so don't see much polyester?

and hemp, one of the best fabrics for many reasons.

Don't forget hemp.