150 years ago, Levi Strauss, a fellow with a vision of a successful dry goods store in San Francisco during the Gold Rush, soon learned that there was a great need for durable pants, and so his sturdy denim jeans came to be. Nowadays, the jeans are a bit less rugged, with distressed and stonewashed styles being sold to an urban public who may only keep them for a few years. The cotton is often grown in one country, processed in another, and stitched in yet another before being shipped to shops that span the globe. But now too, the company is researching the sustainability of their products, not just for the planet, but for their own sustainability as a company. Much of the cotton they use is grown in places that could experience massive climate change effects on the crops, like drought. Floods and drought have already caused spikes in cotton prices.
Among their various efforts towards a more sustainable product is decreasing water use. They figure that one pair of jeans uses close to a thousand gallons of water over its life time. This includes the irrigation for the cotton crop, production of the pants, and then about half of it is for the water used by us for keeping them clean. Irrigation is the largest user of water in the world, and cotton the biggest non food crop grown. It also requires the most pesticides. Levi Strauss is one of many global corporations involved with the Better Cotton Initiative, which teaches farmers techniques that allow them to decrease their water, energy, fertilizer and pesticide use dramatically. The result is called Better Cotton, currently used in only a small percentage of the company's jeans, but on the increase. Levi's now also offers a new line of jeans, selling well, called Water<Less. Seems like a tiny thing, but the line has already saved over 16 million gallons of water. Tiny for Levi's maybe, but not for us.
So in a world of fewer resources and extreme effects of climate change, Levi's wants to remain successful, which will probably only happen by lowering their impact. To decrease it further, they're asking us now, on their labels, to lower ours as well, by washing their jeans less often, by using cold water when we do, and by line drying them if possible. That would go for the whole load, I guess, and there are a heck of a lot of jeans out there.
http://www.levistrauss.com/sustainability/product/life-cycle-jean
http://www.uvm.edu/~shali/Levi.pdf
--
^ ~ ^ ~ ^ ~ ^ ~ ^ ~ ^ ~ ^ ~ ^ ~ ^ ~ ^ ~ ^ ~
Barbara Hirsch, recording engineer, eco-person
"Unless someone like you cares a whole lot,
nothing is going to get better. It's not."
-- The Lorax, Children's book by Dr. Seuss