Fast Fashion Water Calculator

Motivation:

The fast fashion industry uses a massive amount of water, with an estimate of about 93 billion cubic meters of water per year. In order to inform users of the negative impact of this industry on the environment, we wanted to make a website that lets users estimate the amount of water used to make their clothes. With the ability to visualize the consequences of supporting fast fashion, we hope to motivate users to make smarter shopping decisions like buying from sustainable brands and thrifting.

Methods & Findings:

The first hurdle in creating our water calculator was finding accurate and applicable data about how much water is used to make different fashion materials. Our original idea was to calculate the amount of water different brands used to make different types of clothing. However, after attempting to find free and reliable data on a variety of brands, we determined this method of calculating water usage required information unavailable to us. So, we decided to change our approach and generated a list of materials and types of clothing, researching the amount of water required to produce one square inch of each material as well as the average amount of material (in square inches) to create each type of clothing. We then turned to html to write the user-interface, asking the user for a type of clothing and material and using our data to estimate and display the amount of water needed to produce the user-inputted clothing type made out of the user-inputted material.