A plain cotton t-shirt is the most ordinary garment in the world, and in many shops it costs less than a sandwich. That price is possible only because most of the real costs are paid somewhere else: in a cotton field, a dye house, a sewing floor, and eventually a landfill. Here is what goes into one shirt.
Water: roughly 2,700 litres
Cotton is a thirsty crop. Estimates from the Water Footprint Network put a single cotton t-shirt at around 2,700 litres of water — about what one person drinks in two and a half years. Most of it goes into growing the cotton, the rest into processing and dyeing. In regions where cotton is grown in dry climates, that water is drawn from rivers and aquifers that communities depend on.
Chemicals: in the field and in the dye bath
Conventional cotton uses a disproportionate share of the world’s insecticides for the land it occupies. After harvest, the fabric is bleached, dyed and finished with chemicals that frequently end up in rivers near textile hubs. Textile dyeing is widely cited as one of the largest industrial polluters of water worldwide.
Carbon: a global journey before it reaches you
The cotton may be grown on one continent, spun on another, sewn on a third and sold on a fourth. Add the energy used in ginning, spinning, knitting, dyeing and finishing, and a basic t-shirt carries a carbon footprint of several kilograms of CO2 before you wear it once. Fashion as a whole is responsible for an estimated 2–8% of global emissions, depending on the study.
Labour: the part of the price that gets squeezed
When a shirt sells for a few dollars, the person who sewed it typically receives a few cents. Garment work is one of the largest employers of women in the world, and one of the least protected. Low prices at the till are not magic; they are wages that did not get paid, and safety that did not get funded.
The end: worn seven times, then thrown away
Surveys of fast-fashion buyers suggest many garments are worn fewer than ten times before being discarded. Less than 1% of clothing is recycled into new clothing. The rest is burned, buried or shipped to second-hand markets that are already overwhelmed. All that water, chemistry, carbon and labour ends up in a hole in the ground within a year or two.
What a reclaimed garment changes
When a garment is remade from fabric that already exists, almost every line above is crossed out. No new cotton is grown, so no new water or pesticides. No new dyeing. No ocean crossing for raw material. The only new inputs are the hands that cut and sew it, and in our workshop those hands belong to women in Egyptian communities who are paid a fair, steady income for the work.
The honest price of a t-shirt is not the number on the tag. It is everything the tag leaves out. Buying fewer, better pieces, and choosing reclaimed fabric when you can, is the simplest way to stop paying it twice.
