A story behind your pair of jeans
Blue Jeans' Ecological Wake
Buying our jeans we don't know we make a huge impact on the Environment
Jeans - a fashion icon of our generation. Who doesn't have it? But this is the real story. How Blue Jeans are made?
RESOURCES/PRODUCTION
PRODUCTION OF COTTON - The process of manufacture of jeans begins with agriculture. The majority of jeans is 100% cotton. For one pair of jeans, there are 1,500 gallons of water needed to get 1.5 lbs of cotton.
NON-ORGANIC COTTON - to protect the plants from diseases, they are sprayed with approximately 25% of all chemicals used in agriculture.
PRODUCTION OF DENIM - the textile that jeans are made of. To make one pair of jeans the machinery transporting the water requires over 16 ounces of oil.
ACHIEVING THE COLOR - in order to get a proper blue hue of a pair of jeans the yarn is dyed with chemically synthesized indigo that comes from oil or coal. The blue dyes are then poured directly into surrounding rivers.
All these chemicals really affect environment and all that's living in it: animals, insects and plants.
WEAVING OF YARN - is usually made by machinery that needs energy to work.
TRANSPORT
The completed pairs of jeans are stacked and packed in boxes, then transported to stores by freight trains and trucks.
Effects
BIODEGRADABLE BYPRODUCTS - organic pollutants such as dye, starch and soda that, released directly to the body of water, demand oxygen that is taken away from lifeforms.
This process affects ecosystem. All the chemicals poured into the water effect in degradation of the river and killing it's inhabitants.