
Uniqlo cutting water use 99% so jeans don't kill earth - tylersmith21
https://cnalifestyle.channelnewsasia.com/style/how-are-vintage-jeans-made-uniqlo-11836724
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tylersmith21
From the article:

For the record, each pair of Uniqlo jeans uses an average of 100 litres of
water to wash.

A staff said that each wash cycle typically requires about 80kg of pumice
stones. But after just one wash cycle, they’ll be reduced to half their size.
“The stones turn into waste,” Matsubara explained. “They break down into tiny
bits and when discharged, they pollute the water system.”

In fact, the very same distressed design can be replicated with precision on
other pairs of jeans many times over. A designer just has to create the
pattern on the computer beforehand, and the laser system can churn out 60
pairs of jeans per hour, compared to the 10 per hour using manual labour.

“Instead of using pumice stones to wash the jeans, we’ve developed our own eco
stones made of polymer,” he said. “They don’t break down and won’t pollute the
water system.”

And the biggest issue of water usage? A staff said that no water is added at
all in the wash with the eco stones. The jeans are placed into the machine wet
and that is all the moisture used. “The nanobubble technology turns water into
moisture particles to cut down water usage by 99 per cent,”

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mehrdadn
Possibly more significant than the 100L:

> For one, it takes at least 10,000 litres of water to produce just a kilo of
> raw cotton – enough to make only one pair of jeans, according to the United
> Nations. And that’s not counting the water usage in the wash process the
> denim goes through to create the soft texture of used jeans – and other
> repercussions we’ll get to later.

However, I don't know where most of this cotton is grown... if it's in water-
rich regions, is it something that needs to be reduced?

Also worth noting:

> For the record, each pair of Uniqlo jeans uses an average of 100 litres of
> water to wash. That’s actually just 43 litres shy of what the average
> Singaporean uses per day in 2017, according to the PUB.

So I guess this means your jean washes are worth < 2 days' worth of water?

One last question on my mind: is using laser actually greener? Not sure how
much energy (and in what form) that uses.

