Fashion’s relationship with water runs deep. From cotton cultivation to dye houses and finishing plants, every stage of production is saturated with water. But water is not merely a technical input to be managed efficiently. It is a living resource, one that sustains ecosystems, underpins public health, and determines the resilience of communities. To ignore this is to ignore the very conditions of life that the industry depends upon.
At Drip by Drip, we address the man-made water crisis perpetuated by the textile industry and global consumerism, centering the communities and ecosystems most affected by its impacts. Through the generation and exchange of knowledge, strategic collaborations with brands and grassroots organizations, and the cultivation of impact-driven networks, we advance a collective commitment to a water-just and accountable fashion system.
Our work begins from a simple premise: fashion’s responsibility for water must extend beyond efficiency metrics to questions of justice. Stewardship is inseparable from accountability, and accountability is only possible with visibility. While Tier 1 suppliers (cut-and-sew facilities) are increasingly disclosed in brand audits, the deeper supply chain remains obscured. This opacity is not neutral. It is precisely in Tier 2 and 3, raw material production such as cotton farming and spinning, weaving, dyeing, and finishing, that water use and pollution peak. When these sites are hidden, so too are the workers and communities whose lives are most entangled with their impacts.
The Hidden Water Footprint in Deeper Supply Chains
Fashion’s deepest water impacts remain systematically obscured by the very structures that claim to govern them. Public disclosures often stop at the cut-and-sew stage, leaving the far more water-intensive and polluting processes such as spinning, dyeing, and raw material production obscured. This opacity is not accidental but symptomatic of a system designed to privilege commercial confidentiality over environmental accountability.
The CDP Report “Interwoven Risks, Untapped Opportunities” (2020) illustrates this imbalance: among the 62 apparel companies surveyed, only a handful had set time-bound water targets or monitored progress. Similarly, the Fashion Transparency Index (2024) (FTI) found that, although 52% of the 250 brands assessed now publish first-tier supplier lists, this number drops to 36% for processing facilities and just 12% for raw material suppliers. Out of the 250 brands on the FTI, only 3% disclose their annual water footprint at the raw-material level. This is particularly striking because Tier 2 and, especially, Tier 3 (raw material suppliers) are where water-related risks, such as water quality, scarcity, freshwater biodiversity, water governance, and WASH, are most material in textile supply chains. This highlights whose realities are visible and raises questions about whether companies are fully aware of the environmental and social impacts of their operations and supply chains.
These gaps are not neutral; they are structural sites of erasure. In Bangladesh, over 1,700 dyeing mills draw an estimated 1,500 billion litres of groundwater each year, releasing untreated effluent into rivers that sustain rural livelihoods. In Tiruppur, India, industrial wastewater has rendered stretches of the Noyyal River biologically dead, eroding the foundations of local agriculture and community health. Layers of subcontracting and informal labour deepen this systemized invisibility. Small, often unregistered workshops operate outside both regulation and data systems, absorbing the risks such outsourcing externalizes. Within this architecture, responsibility flows upward whilst harm is imposed downward, falling on workers, women, and communities whose voices rarely register in global supply chain governance.
Transparency in Practice: How Drip by Drip Works
At Drip by Drip, our interventions are grounded in collaboration with local stakeholders and partner NGOs across textile-producing regions. When a brand seeks to invest in water-related projects, we begin by mapping existing supplier networks and drawing on the knowledge and field assessments of local organizations. These on-the-ground diagnostics allow us to pinpoint the most urgent needs—whether that’s broken or absent WASH facilities, rainwater harvesting for farmers—and then co-design interventions tailored to specific realities on the ground.
But limited visibility constrains the scope of possibility. Many brands approach us with data that stops at Tier 1 suppliers. While interventions at this level, such as improving WASH facilities or menstrual hygiene access are essential, they often address consequences rather than root causes. In this landscape, platforms centered on transparency, such as Open Supply Hub, become crucial: by revealing the extent and limits of company supply chain mapping, they provide a baseline for monitoring corporate disclosure and accountability.
These tools do not replace local expertise—they amplify it. They expand the space in which locally led interventions can address systemic water risks, redistribute knowledge, and ensure that communities most affected by industrial water burdens are recognized as co-creators of solutions rather than passive data points.
Decolonial and Feminist Perspectives on Supply Chain Data
Supply chain data in fashion remains largely proprietary and brand-controlled—produced to safeguard profit rather than people. Decision-making power and data ownership sit in the Global North, while the material costs of opacity such as polluted rivers, depleted aquifers, and unsafe workplaces are borne by workers and communities across the Global South.
These water burdens are profoundly gendered. Women form the backbone of garment production yet are the first to bear the fallout of contamination, water scarcity, and the expanded unpaid labour that follows. In regions where water scarcity already strains daily life, dye effluent and groundwater depletion compound that burden, turning water injustice into a distinctly gendered issue.
A decolonial approach to transparency begins by inverting this hierarchy. It rejects extractive data practices and instead builds participatory, community-led systems in which rightsholders (workers, unions, and local organizations) govern what knowledge is shared, how, and with whom.
Findings from Open Supply Hub’s recent consultation with 65 unions and CSOs reinforce this call. Data ecosystems must ensure safety and reciprocity for those who disclose risks; they must be multilingual and low-bandwidth to remain accessible; and they must redistribute value downward so knowledge serves those most affected.
At Drip by Drip, this principle underpins our work.Transparency is meaningful only when it strengthens the agency of those living the realities of water stress. Through grounded partnerships led by local NGOs and communities, we seek to translate data into justice, ensuring that those most affected by the fashion industry’s water footprint are not just data subjects, but co-authors of knowledge and co-governors of accountability.
From Data to Justice
True transparency is not a neutral technical upgrade; it is a political act that redistributes visibility, responsibility, and voice across global supply chains.
For brands, this means moving decisively beyond Tier 1 disclosure and enabling systems where workers, women, unions, and communities co-govern data about the environments they live in. For civil society, open platforms like Open Supply Hub offer critical infrastructure to hold claims to account and support interventions grounded in local realities.
At Drip by Drip, we continue to work at the intersection of water justice and supply chain accountability, grounding every project in local knowledge and community agency. But lasting impact depends on transparency being shared, not owned.
We call on brands and NGOs to make transparency a conduit of justice: to let data flow back to the people and places most affected. Only then can supply chain transparency begin to repair and rebalance the inequities embedded in fashion’s global footprint. Drip by Drip will remain committed to this work, but real progress depends on all actors treating transparency as a shared responsibility, not a tool of control.
