WE casually wear simple jeans and a cotton t-shirt, but we have never thought of how much water was used to make these jeans and t-shirt. It can take as much as 2,700 liters of water to make a cotton t-shirt, while jeans can need almost 7,600 liters per pair. It takes a large amount of water to simply grow the cotton in order to make the material itself, and then copious amounts of water are needed during various different wash processes in order to bring the material down in shade to the lighter blue colors that are most popular.
To make clothing without the massive water footprint, the industry is developing new ways to reduce the environmental impact of the manufacturing process. Levi’s, for example, has a finishing technique called ‘Water Less’, that used 96 percent less water than traditional methods. The company has made some 13 million ‘Water Less’ products since launching the initiative in 2011.
It is also working on a way to recycle old cotton clothes into new denim. The initial prototype used five old cotton-shorts to make a pair of jeans, using 98 percent less water than virgin cotton.
Sportswear manufacturers like Adidas and Nike, for example, have embraced ‘waterless dyeing’ technology, which uses high pressure carbon dioxide (CO2) as a replacement for water to dye their colourful polyester gear. In the ‘regular’ way, dyeing a kilogram of textiles takes approximately 70-150 liters of water. New technology reduces it to zero. The CO2 used in the process originates from other industrial sources and is 95 percent recyclable. On top of that, the technology uses less chemicals and about half the energy of conventional dyeing techniques. More and more people will be living with water scarcity. Conserve water by reducing massive water consumption.