Background of Jeans
Meanwhile it’s no secret anymore that the jeans industry has a grave impact on the environment. Still I want to leave some more details and facts about that here.
One jeans needs around 10 000 litres of water to be made. To imagine this number DW gives this example: “Every time you buy a new pair of jeans, it's like turning on your shower and letting the water run down the drain for 21 hours.” But the amount of water used to make one jeans is just one aspect. Moreover chemicals (e.g. the poisonous cyanide) are used to colour the jeans since the denim is naturally white. Additional this very colour is often partly washed out afterwards again through the sandblasting method (which is often fatal for workers who inhale particles of sand) to get the well known ‘used look’.
Speaking of the water and the chemicals: Many factories make no water preparation but just pump the toxic water into rivers, lakes or the sea.
Recording to Levi’s, one jeans emits 33.4 kg of CO2 into the atmosphere which would be the equivalent of driving more than 1 000 km with a car. Now we can add the number of bought jeans a year to complete this image: around two billion pairs. This huge demand makes the industry use weaving cotton with petrol-based elastic fibers which is non-biodegradable and hard to recycle.