Waterless or less water?
What’s one of the least ‘sustainable’ products in your home? Is your washing machine, your dishwasher? Would you be surprised to learn it’s your jeans? Yes, that wardrobe staple uses 11,000 L of ‘embedded water’ to create 1kg of jeans. According to waterfootprint.org that’s more than twice the amount of water to produce a kilo of rice. (Global average water footprint: 3400 litres for 1 kg of rice..)
So, we should applaud anyone who takes steps to reduce the water intensity of the jeans manufacturing process.
Yesterday (Nov 3) Levi’s released their new “Water<Less” jeans range.
They claim to have reduced the water used in “finishing” some of their products by 96%. Fantastic.
Over the entire “waterless” range, they’ve “reduced the amount of water by an average of 28%”. That’s good. But is it waterless?
Let’s see: they’re focused on the “finishing” part of the process, not the whole process. The Levi’s release states “the average pair of jeans uses 42 liters of water in the finishing process”. Compare that to “the average water footprint of printed cotton (for example a pair of jeans weighing 1 kilogram) is 11,000 litres per kilogram.”
hhmmmm..
So, what we’ve got is a product range called “Water<less” that saves (on average) about 11 L of water per pair of jeans (against 11,000 total). Sell a million of those babies, that’s a significant water saving..
Less water. Sure. But do they deserve the label Waterless?
