The Environmental Cost of our Lives
How sustainable is your life? Today, the GoodStat of the Day looks at what it takes to produce items we consume everyday
Published in
2 min readJan 6, 2022
It’s hard to know the Environmental Cost of our everyday actions, especially what we wear and eat!
One t-shirt takes between 2,000 and 6,000 litres of water to produce, equivalent to 1kg of cotton (reported by Forbes, although a contested stat from the WWF in 2013 put this as high as 20k litres per t-shirt)
“One t-shirt takes between 2k-6k litres of water to produce”
Some other examples:
- One glass of diary milk requires 125 litres of water (BBC)
- That is roughly x10 more than soy or oat milk (BBC)
- More than 25% of emissions can be traced back to the food industry, with beef regarded as one of the worst offenders (BBC)
- On that basis, one beef burger contributes 7.7kg of carbon (BBC)
- Eating a plant based diet for 1 year could save c. 1.1 tonnes (1,100kg) of carbon (FT)
- Or alternatively, avoiding one long distance flight would be equivalent to cutting roughly 1.6 tonnes (1,600kg) of carbon (FT)
- And another option is offsetting. For example, Brewdog announced that they take out two tonnes of carbon for every one tonne spent (Brewdog)
