Matt Damon and Gap want to give the world more fresh water. But a pair of Gap jeans takes 7,500 liters to make.
On June 9, Water.org co-founder Matt Damon posted a TikTok in which he attempted to launch a rap career. He went by The Nomad — Damon spelled backwards, a persona created specifically for this campaign — and recruited Grammy-winning producer Hit-Boy to help him make the case for safe water access. The following night he took the bit to The Tonight Show, where The Roots played along and Black Thought rapped off-camera while Damon mouthed the words. It was earnest and a little ridiculous in the way that only genuinely motivated people can be, and it was in service of Get Blue, a new initiative from Water.org and four founding brand partners: Gap, Starbucks, Amazon, and Ecolab.
Gap’s contribution is a limited-edition capsule — denim, tees, hoodies, and accessories for the full family, rendered entirely in shades of blue. With each purchase, Gap donates $5 to Water.org, which uses that money to fund something more interesting than most charitable fashion activations: a microloan model that helps families in water-scarce communities finance their own pipes, pumps, and plumbing. Ninety-eight percent of those loans are repaid, which means the money circulates and helps additional families rather than arriving once and disappearing. It’s a rare mechanism in the world of cause marketing: one that compounds. Water.org has helped more than 90 million people access safe water through this model and is aiming for 200 million by 2030. “To bring water home for everyone, everywhere within our lifetimes, we have to scale even faster,” Gary White, CEO and co-founder of Water.org, said in the launch announcement.
More than 2.2 billion people worldwide still lack access to safe water at home. That’s one in four people across the planet. Get Blue is a legitimate response to a legitimate crisis, and the brands involved — including Gap — have long-standing relationships with Water.org that predate this campaign. It is, however, being launched by a denim company. And denim is one of fashion’s thirstiest products.
A single pair of jeans requires approximately 7,500 liters of water to produce — a figure the United Nations Environment Programme has cited and that accounts for everything from irrigating cotton fields to the dyeing and finishing processes that give denim its particular weight and color. A cotton t-shirt, by comparison, uses around 2,700 liters. The fashion industry consumes roughly 93 billion cubic meters of water annually — enough, by some estimates, to meet the basic needs of 5 million people indefinitely. Textile dyeing alone — the process responsible for Get Blue’s blues — accounts for approximately 20 percent of global industrial water pollution, according to the UNEP. A single ton of dyed fabric can generate 200 tons of wastewater.
None of this is a secret, and none of it is Gap’s fault uniquely. To be clear: Gap has been working on its water footprint, and not quietly. Its Washwell program, which reduces water use in garment finishing by at least 20 percent compared to conventional methods, has saved 6 billion liters of water since 2016. In 2025, Gap Inc. hit its goal of sourcing 100 percent of cotton from more sustainable sources — Better Cotton Initiative, organic, recycled, regenerative, or traceable U.S.-grown. And in a partnership with Indian denim mill Arvind Limited, Gap is working to replace over 1 billion liters of freshwater annually with reclaimed municipal wastewater across Arvind’s denim operations. These are meaningful commitments, and the Arvind work in particular is a supply-chain-level change that matters more than almost anything happening at the consumer end.
Six billion liters saved sounds like a lot. It is a lot. It’s also roughly 800,000 pairs of jeans’ worth of water saved over nine years, against a global fashion system that produces around 100 billion garments annually. The Washwell number is good. The math of the industry’s problem, though, is much bigger. Which is where the material conversation becomes more relevant than the charitable one.
The fashion industry’s most water-efficient levers aren’t in the factory — they’re in the field, and in fiber selection. Organic cotton can use up to 91 percent less “blue water” — meaning surface water and groundwater — than conventionally grown cotton, largely because organic farming practices build soil that captures and holds rainfall rather than requiring irrigation. Hemp grows with minimal water, no pesticides, and absorbs carbon rather than emitting it. Tencel/lyocell, made from responsibly sourced wood pulp in a closed-loop system, recycles up to 99.5 percent of the water and solvents used in its production. Linen, grown from flax, is largely rain-fed and requires minimal irrigation.
Gap already sources from more sustainable cotton. What it hasn’t announced is a Get Blue collection built from materials with meaningfully lower water footprints — a Get Blue denim line made with Arvind’s reclaimed wastewater process, or a hoodie in organic linen or Tencel instead of conventionally finished cotton. That move would be harder to make and harder to explain, but it would also be harder to complicate.
Cause-marketing fashion campaigns have a long track record. The (RED) campaign, which Cosmopolitan recently compared Get Blue to, launched in 2006 and eventually raised more than $700 million for the Global Fund — and it did so by doing exactly what Get Blue is doing: making the cause visible, the action simple, and the purchase feel meaningful. Get Blue is following a model that works, and it’s doing it with partners who take it seriously. The microloan repayment rate is real. The 90 million people served is real.
The most durable version of the campaign is the one that looks at both ends of the problem simultaneously — raising money for communities without water while also reducing the water cost of what the brand makes. Gap is already doing the latter. It could be a lot more visible about it, and Get Blue is a good moment to make that case.
“I won’t stop looking for creative ways to draw attention, encourage participation and drive donations to help solve the global water crisis,” Damon said at the launch. It’s commendable. The fuller version of that ambition, though, is a fashion company that can say: here’s what we’re doing about the water we use, and here’s what we’re doing about the water families don’t have. It’s the story worth telling — and the one fashion hasn’t quite gotten to yet.
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