Does it take 10,000 litres of water to make a pair of jeans?
More or Less: Behind the Stats
00:00
Cotton's 10,000 Liters of Water
WWF removed the number from their website in 2020 after Elizabeth and other researchers contacted them, querying the validity of the claim. We were able to trace back to a World Wildlife Fund report from 1999. What we found is the report never actually said cotton uses 20,000 litres of water, pretty shirt and pair of jeans. The issue with it though is that it came out in 2006 and it's leveraging data as old as 1996 so it's just obsolete. Another issue with a figure is that it counts all water associated with growing cotton, even rain.
Transcript
Play full episode
