A new Danish denim label is aiming to ‘save’ 70 million litres of fresh water over the next two months as part of a plan to drive innovation in the ‘resource intensive’ industry.

The Denim Project says that 15 per cent of cotton is wasted every year during the manufacturing process, wasting enough material to produce three t-shirts for each person on the planet. Cotton crop is very water intensive, and the company says that waste cotton equates to 38.5 billion litres of fresh water, which could provide drinking water to 25 million people yearly.

Subsequently, it has designed a fabric made of 98 per cent production waste, with stretch fabric, the remaining two per cent, the only new material. Waste material, leftover from the clothes manufacturing process, is sorted into colour and spun into yarn, which is then reused to make the new garment. The process uses no dyes and saves a kilogramme of cotton per item, which the company estimates is equivalent to 11,000 litres of water.

The Denim Project is promoting its new line at a fashion week event in Berlin on 19 January and attempting to raise funds for production of the new jeans by selling 5,000 pairs of (more traditionally-manufactured) jeans by 18 February.

Sustainable opportunities must be acted on

Jesper Keiser, co-owner of the Denim Project, said: “We have plenty of opportunities to make a sustainable transition, but it seems like everyone is waiting around thinking that there will be a solution tomorrow. Let’s start the future today.

“As long as we are talking about sustainability as something special, it
is not a fully integrated part of our businesses. We want to invent this quality since we in our research found that this is the most attractive jeans quality for most people.”

Denim and sustainable clothing

Since September, high street fashion brand H&M has been selling 16 new denim styles made using cotton recycled from textiles collected in stores through the company’s Garment Collection Initiative.

The brand says that currently it is able to use 20 per cent recycled cotton from collected clothes, but that it is investing in new technology that will enable it to ‘increase this share without losing quality’.

The issue of sustainable fashion has been studied by the Waste & Resources Action Programme (WRAP) recently. It has found that by extending a product’s active life by just nine months could reduce the carbon, waste and water footprints by 20-30 per cent each.

In a 2012 report, ‘Valuing Our Clothes – The true cost of how we design, use and dispose of clothes in the UK’, the programme found that of the million tonnes of clothes supplied on the UK market each year a third ‘end up in landfill when they’re finished with’ and that ‘around £30 billion-worth of clothes are unused in people’s wardrobes’.

The following year saw WRAP launch the Sustainable Clothing Action Plan (SCAP), which aims to improve the sustainability of clothing across its lifecycle by signing up retailers and brands to the SCAP 2020 Commitment.

Through action carried out by the commitment’s 82 signatories, WRAP hopes to save: more than 1,200,000 tonnes of CO2 equivalent per year – equal to the annual CO2 emissions of nearly 250,000 cars; 420,000,000 cubic metres of water per year – equivalent to more than 160,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools; and over 16,000 tonnes of waste arising.

In an update of results released in November, WRAP announced that signatories had reduced water impacts by 12.5 per cent per tonnes of clothing and carbon impacts by 3.5 per cent since its launch, though waste arisings have not fallen.

More information on the Denim Project can be found at the company’s website.