I have to stop buying cotton. 😦 For all my whining about how the cattle industry is sucking up what precious little water we have left, I just found out (courtesy of H&M’s CSR report) that it takes 2,245 gallons of water to grow enough cotton to make one pair of jeans. No idea if that’s with the most efficient irrigation methods (70% of farm water is wasted worldwide due to poor irrigation) or with typical irrigation.

That means I’ve got at least 40,000 gallons of water in the jeans sitting in my closet. Including the socially responsible pair that just came in the mail.

My deepest apologies to those who were hoping to do a little subsistence farming with that.