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When blue jeans turn green

The sustainable benefits of laser technology

At Coats we know a lot about denim, each year we make enough thread to go into 8 billion pairs of jeans – that would be enough for every person on the planet. And it’s thought that the average person owns at least seven pairs of jeans.

Together, our love of denim and the processes used to recreate the look consumers desire, uses vast amounts of water and chemicals. With an average of 6,800 litres of water used to create a pair of denims from growing cotton, through manufacturing, consumer care and end of life disposal, we can see the stress this places on our environment as well as resource. Fortunately, denim brands are working towards environmentally conscious production methods by using less water and chemicals. The solution? Lasers.

Using laser technology, denim manufacturers are able to recreate popular distressed styles, create patterns and even add images. But the real benefits of this technology is in its ability to make denim go green, yielding impressive environmental and worker safety benefits as well as increase production.

An article by Fibre2fashion, suggests about six billion units of jeans are produced annually, where 70 liters of water, 1kw/h and 150gms of chemicals are used for per denim, that totals 420 million m3 of water, 6 billion kw/h and 900,000 tons of chemicals. If a denim manufacturer uses this new technology, the equivalent of two years of human consumption of water in Paris and two years consumption of electricity in Nepal could be saved per year, as well as 720,000 tons of chemicals products.

Laser technology is another name for sustainable finishing in the denim wash sector and it will change the future of this market. That said, manufacturers must also consider the quality of additional components that go into the production of a pair of denims – thread being one them. Coats offers an extensive range of threads suitable for denim application: Coats Dual DutyCoats Dual Duty Supercotton y Coats Tre Cerchi, are three exceptional sewing threads for your denim laser wash needs. While consumers may not yet care to ask ‘How my jeans were aged?’ or ‘How environmentally friendly are my jeans? Or even ‘What types of threads are used in my jeans?’, one day they might. And one cannot help but feel that it’s good to go green.