How much water it takes to create 30 common items

It takes about 713 gallons of water (2,700 liters) to grow the cotton needed to produce one cotton T-shirt. A polyester T-shirt is a lower-water option, but it uses more oil to produce.

It takes around 2,074 gallons of water to produce a set of car tires. Most tires are made from synthetic rubber, which requires water to produce, and water is also used to generate the steam needed to cure the tire. To save water, people can use bikes with smaller tires as their primary transportation.

It takes significantly more than a cup of water to make a cup of coffee. It takes about 37 gallons of water to grow and process the number of beans needed for a single cup. Unfortunately, the only way to be more eco-friendly about coffee is to drink less coffee.

In the 1960s, U.S. steel plants used about 34,000 gallons of water to produce a ton of steel, according to a U.S. Geological Survey study of the industry. Steelmakers have made real gains since then: thanks to recycling and closed-loop cooling, the water actually consumed per ton has dropped to somewhere between 800 and 1,300 gallons today, even though the total water withdrawn and circulated during production is still around 7,500 gallons per ton.

About 2,000 gallons of water go into creating a single pair of jeans, thanks to the cotton growth and apparel manufacturing processes. Levi Strauss & Co. is investing in water-saving finishing techniques and encouraging customers to wash jeans less often and in cold water.

Phones and water don't mix, but smartphones are essentially born from water—the manufacturing process uses more than 3,400 gallons of water. These water requirements have a lot to do with the components of a smartphone; each chip included needs to be rinsed more than 30 times.

The four main ingredients in beer are hops, yeast, barley, and water. It takes about 20 gallons of water to make a single pint, a number that includes the water used in the brew and in the growth cycle of the plants. Brewers have caught on: some large breweries now use as little as six to eight liters of water for every liter of beer they produce, well down from historical ratios.

On top of all the water needed to create tires for cars, manufacturing a car itself can use more than 39,000 gallons of water. Water is needed during most of the manufacturing process, including surface treatment coating, washing, rinsing, hosing, and cooling.

A 60-watt incandescent light bulb left on for 12 hours a day for a year uses roughly 263 kilowatt-hours of electricity. Power plants draw about 20 to 60 gallons of water for every kilowatt-hour they generate, whether for cooling or for producing steam — which puts that single bulb's water footprint somewhere between 5,250 and 15,800 gallons a year. Energy-efficient LED bulbs use a fraction of the electricity, and with it, a fraction of the water.

It takes 1,799 gallons of water to produce a 16-ounce steak because that's how much water a cow consumes before it arrives on someone's dinner plate. Going vegetarian is more eco-friendly because vegetable production uses significantly less water.

Thirsty grapes lead to thirsty wine (a gallon of wine takes about 872 gallons of water to make). That figure includes the water needed to grow grapes and the water used to sanitize equipment during production.

Children go through thousands of diapers (sometimes up to 12,000) before they're completely potty-trained. One widely cited estimate puts the water footprint of a single disposable diaper at around 144 gallons, though methodologies vary. Reusable cloth diapers cut down on manufacturing water, though washing them repeatedly adds its own water cost worth weighing before switching.

A plastic water bottle has a relatively low water impact compared to the rest of the items on this list, but it still takes about 1.4 gallons of water to produce a typical single-use bottle, once you count both the water used directly and the water polluted in the process. Most of that comes from drilling and refining the oil used to make the plastic. Still, people can save extra water and plastic by switching to reusable bottles.

It takes far more water than most people assume to build a computer. A full supply-chain analysis (covering everything from mining the metals to manufacturing the components and assembling the final product) puts a laptop's total water footprint at around 190,000 liters, or roughly 50,000 gallons. Most of that is consumed upstream, in component manufacturing, rather than in final assembly. Remember, every chip inside the computer needs to be rinsed more than 30 times. Tablets and other smaller electronic devices are more eco-friendly alternatives.

It takes around 2,011 gallons of water to make a pair of leather shoes, most of it from raising the cattle used for leather. More eco-friendly alternatives include vegan shoes and footwear made from synthetic materials.

Producing a pound of pork requires 718 gallons of water, which is still well under half the water needed to produce a pound of beef.

A single cotton T-shirt takes somewhere around 650 to 715 gallons of water to produce, most of it used to irrigate the cotton. Polyester, a synthetic fiber, uses far less water to produce, though it comes with its own trade-offs, including greater reliance on oil and microplastic shedding during washing.

About 172 gallons of water are needed to produce the grain for a loaf of bread. That means a single slice uses around 11 gallons. Eating lettuce wraps or sandwiches with thinner bread slices are more eco-friendly alternatives.

The amount of water required to create paper varies based on the size, material, and color of each piece. Still, it takes more than 3 gallons of water to make a standard notebook sheet. An A4 size sheet of paper can use up to 8 gallons of water to produce.

It takes about 34 gallons of water to produce a pound of potatoes, and even less for drought-resistant varieties. The potato also makes efficient use of that water: for every cubic meter used in cultivation, it produces about 5,600 calories of dietary energy, more than any other major crop, according to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization.

Chicken has one of the lowest rates of water usage among meats. Producing a pound of chicken requires 468 gallons of water. However, producing healthy chickens for human consumption still uses significantly more water than vegetable production. Ditching meat altogether is a far more sustainable option.

Before an AI chatbot ever answers a question, training it already has a water bill. Researchers estimated that training GPT-3 inside Microsoft's U.S. data centers directly evaporated about 700,000 liters (185,000 gallons) of freshwater over roughly two weeks, and that number climbs to 5.4 million liters (1.4 million gallons) once the water used to generate its electricity is counted too. Companies are increasingly building data centers with air cooling or reclaimed water to bring that number down.

It takes about 13 gallons of water to produce a gallon of gasoline. Roughly three to six gallons of that goes toward refining the oil, with the rest used earlier, during extraction and drilling. Automobiles that use less gas, like hybrid cars or electric cars, are more eco-friendly alternatives.

Growing a single apple takes about 18 gallons of water, according to widely cited water-footprint estimates. With that in mind, eating apples is more water-efficient than drinking apple juice, since a cup of juice requires closer to 60 gallons of water to produce.

A single AI chatbot query doesn't use much water on its own, but multiplied across billions of daily requests, the totals add up fast — though not everyone agrees on how much. A widely cited UC Riverside-led study estimated that a chatbot built on a model the size of GPT-3 needs about a 500-milliliter bottle of water for every 10 to 50 medium-length responses, mostly to cool the data centers running the calculations.

OpenAI itself has offered a far smaller figure: CEO Sam Altman said in 2025 that the average ChatGPT query uses about 0.000085 gallons of water, roughly a fifteenth of a teaspoon. OpenAI has also said ChatGPT fields about 2.5 billion prompts a day worldwide; multiplying that by Altman's per-query figure puts ChatGPT's global water use at roughly 200,000 gallons a day, or around 6 million gallons a month.

Independent estimates built on the original UC Riverside research suggest the real number could run tens of times higher than OpenAI's own figure, into the millions of gallons a day, since that research assumed less efficient hardware than today's models use. Shorter prompts and fewer unnecessary follow-ups use less energy, and with it, less water.

It takes about 660 gallons of water to make a third-pound hamburger, most of it from raising cattle for the beef. Other water-footprint estimates put the figure closer to 600 gallons for that same amount of beef, so treat any single hamburger stat as a reasonable ballpark rather than an exact number.

Every other entry on this list measures how much water goes into making or doing one specific thing. This one doesn't play by that rule, and we're breaking it on purpose: AI's water use mostly happens at the scale of an entire data center, not a single product, so it doesn't reduce to one clean number the way a T-shirt or a hamburger does. We're including it anyway because AI and data centers have become one of the biggest flashpoints in the water conversation right now, sparking real lawsuits, public-records fights, and community pushback across the country — not a hypothetical concern, but an active one.

Meta's data center in Newton County, Georgia — now facing a lawsuit from four local families who say construction contaminated their well water — uses about 500,000 gallons of water a day, roughly 10% of the entire county's water consumption. Google's data centers in The Dalles, Oregon, only became public knowledge after the city lost a records fight with its own newspaper; they draw around 1 million gallons a day and were pulling a third of the town's water supply by 2024. And in Memphis, the NAACP threatened to sue Elon Musk's xAI over its Colossus supercomputer, which is now getting an $80 million wastewater treatment plant so it can cool itself without touching the aquifer the city drinks from. Zoomed out to the company level, Google's global data centers and offices used about 8.1 billion gallons of water in 2024 alone, up 28% from the year before — an average of just over 22 million gallons every day — as AI workloads pushed demand higher.

You need about 450 gallons of water to make a single chocolate bar. The vast majority of that water goes toward growing the cocoa plants used to make chocolate. Luckily for chocolate lovers, it's not as wasteful as it sounds: most of the water used to grow cocoa is rainwater, thanks to the plant's ideal growing climate.

A single dollar's worth of pet food requires about 200 gallons of water to produce. More than half of that water is used to grow the grains and feed the livestock used to make the ingredients, and the rest is used to make the food itself.

A dozen eggs require 636 gallons of water to produce, meaning a single egg requires 53 gallons worth of water to produce. Healthy chickens require water for drinking, and they also dine on a water-intensive grain feed.