14 DAY TRIAL // American clothing company Levi-Strauss & Co. claims that, with the help of a new technology, it has recently managed to make 100,000 pairs of jeans using 100% recycled water alone.
The clothes manufacturer further explains that, according to its estimates, this translated into water savings amounting to an impressive 12 million liters.
To put things into perspective, it must be said that the 12 million liters that Levi's saved would be more than enough to fill five Olympic-sized swimming pools.
Tree Hugger tells us that the 100,000 pairs of environmentally friendly women's jeans were made at a factory in China.
It is at this factory where Levi-Strauss & Co. introduced an innovative water recycling system, an initiative whose goal was to improve on the ecological footprint of the factory's working agenda.
The first step in using this recycling system is providing the factory with the water that it needs in order to make clothes.
After being used for a first time, some of this water is treated to meet a series of standards, both local and imposed by the company, and then discharged.
However, part of the initial water input undergoes yet another treatment, meaning that is it passed through a micro-filtration system that cleans it to such an extent that it can be re-used in the manufacturing process.
“Not all of the water goes through the recycle treatment. But then once it goes through the recycle treatment, it is actually much purer,” Michael Kobori, the current vice-president of sustainability at Levi-Strauss & Co. explained in a statement.
The company has not yet implemented this water recycling technology at other of the factories that it operates, but says that it plans to do so in the not so distant future.
“We're working with two other factories one of them in Latin America, and the other in South Asia, to install the same kind of recycle water process. We really want to continue to scale it up to as many of our suppliers as we can,” Michael Kobori said.
In case anyone was wondering, Levi-Strauss & Co needs to use quite a lot of water in order to be able to finish the look of the jeans it wants to make and market. Specifically, it washes them several times in order to give them a certain color and texture.
“Depending on the look that we want to achieve with denim, the jeans can be washed any number of times. Every different look has literally a different recipe,” Michael Kobori told the press in a recent interview.