Insider
Environment
How much Cola are your
jeans worth?
In every corner of our consumer driven soci-
ety, the planet suffers…
Water consumption is-
n’t something we fre-
quently worry our-
selves about, especial-
ly in places such as the
fashion industry where
thousands of gallons of
water are used just to
make a single pair of
jeans!
It came as a massive
shock to me when I
found out how much
water is used in the
process of creating
clothing, and how that
water could be given
to those who need it
the most. Many jeans
are made from cotton
and the process of
growing this cotton to
make into denim uses
approximately 1,800
gallons of water as
said by Treehug-
ger.com, that’s roughly
around 6814 litre bot-
tles of coke worth of
water! For only enough
cotton to make ONE
pair of jeans! Now,
when you take into ac-
count the entire pro-
cess of making one
pair of jeans, making
the cotton and the dy-
ing process, it takes
9,982 gallons of water-
approximately 45,379
litre bottles of coke!
as well as the overall
global textile produc-
tion, with 1.3 trillion
gallons being used
yearly for fabric dy-
ing. Even one cotton t
shirt takes 715 gal-
lons of water to make
- that’s nearly three
years’ worth of drink-
ing water! Something
needs to change, and
fast.
We can’t all be in con-
trol of everything that
happens in these in-
dustries, but by shop-
How large the cotton fields can become
ping in more eco-
friendly places we can
help begin to change
Do you enjoy wearing Levi’s jeans? What
the world for the bet-
about the 501® edition? Well, these jeans
ter.
alone take up to 3,781 gallons of water to
make just one pair, pulled straight from
their website. Levis are currently looking
into different ways to manufacture cotton,
even using recycled cotton, Levis stating
that jeans made of 15% recycled cotton
will save will save all that water, all those
thousands of gallons, used during the re-
cycling process.
One in ten people around the world do not
have access to clean drinking water, six
out of ten people around the world do not
have access to proper functioning toilets.
The things we take for granted. After oil
and paper, the fashion industry is the third
biggest consumers of water consumption
around the globe, with 25 billion gallons of
water being used yearly for growing cotton
The College magazine online: sixthformmag.blogspot.co.uk