Water Saving Week: The Importance of Embracing Sustainable Technologies
World Water Saving Week emphasises the importance of being water efficient. What is the water problem in the textile industry and what solutions are there?
Waterwise is an independent, not-for-profit UK NGO focused on reducing water consumption. They support and challenge governments, industry, customers and others to be innovative and ambitious on water efficiency.Annually, Waterwise holds World Water Saving Week. The week aims to be a platform for the sharing of ideas, solutions and related challenges to help participants save water and maintain its efficient use in daily lives.
Importantly, Waterwise notes that Water Saving Week should emphasise the idea that being water efficient can help communities and wildlife to thrive. We will be reviewing this concept through the lens of the textile industry and its impact on the communities around it.
Firstly, it is important to look at the textile industry and its relationship with water. The bottom line is that the industry uses a massive amount of it. The Indian textile industry uses nearly 193,000,000[1] litres of water a day. That’s nearly 80 Olympic swimming pools every single day. Many items that we use every day are made of textiles that require thousands of litres of water to produce. The average sofa needs 2273 litres of water to produce its fabric and it takes 2295 litres to produce a single pair of denim jeans.
This water is used mostly in the bleaching section of the process, but the dyeing of the textiles also uses an enormous amount. It is during these manufacturing procedures that 90-95% of water used by standard textile processing factories ends up as ‘effluent’. This means that millions of gallons of water are discarded as waste. If we are serious about saving water, this needs to change.
It is incredibly important to look at the actual impact that this massive water usage has on the communities and habitats that rely on natural water supplies. Overwhelmingly, communities that are affected are those in third world countries who rely on fresh water sources for their livelihoods and those that benefit are first-world retailers and fashion houses. The fashion industry uses enough water to ‘quench the thirst’ of 110 million people for an entire year[2], and the 93 billion cubic metres of water[3] used in textile production annually is 4% of overall global freshwater withdrawal. Moreover, the World Bank says that if we continue our current trajectory, two-thirds of the world’s population will face water shortages by 2050. This will impact people mostly in countries where the textile industry carries out much of its production line – from using water to grow cotton to using local water sources in the manufacturing process. The impact of ultra-intensive water usage by the textile industry is significant. This may progress to the point where cotton growing nations face the dilemma of choosing between cotton production and securing clean drinking water[4].
As noted above, one of the fundamental messages of World Water Saving week is that water efficiency has an impact on the ability of communities and wildlife to thrive. Water availability matters. Given that the textile manufacturing process uses such a significant amount of water and predominantly negatively affects water-reliant communities, it is vital that they recognise their duty to make greater efforts to protect the communities in which they are active. Something needs to change, both in the amount of water they use and the state of the wastewater they release.
With funding from the EU, and in collaboration with European partner organisations, Waste2Fresh is developing a closed-loop water system that prevents water contaminated with toxic chemicals and dyes from being released into freshwater systems. The water is instead filtered and reused by the manufacturers themselves. Importantly, this means that factories can drastically reduce the amount of water that they draw from local water sources, increasing water and resource efficiency by 30%.
On top of this, while most processes of removing dyes from wastewater produce significant amounts of toxic sludge, Waste2Fresh’s mechanism recycles the water without producing any. This is a key part in preventing contamination of nearby environments and is a significant step towards near-zero discharge.
In these ways, Waste2Fresh’s mechanism provides a way for textile factories to massively reduce the amount of water they use, while greatly reducing the impact of any waste that is expelled into the local environment. World Water Saving Week highlights the importance of sustainable technologies such as Waste2Fresh in improving water quality, water reservation and water sustainability. It’s vital that the textile industry acts now and embraces such vital sustainable technologies.
[1] https://oecotextiles.blog/2010/02/24/textiles-and-water-use/#_ftn3
[2] https://www.globalfashionagenda.com/publications-and-policy/pulse-of-the-industry/
[3] https://catalogue.unccd.int/1352_thirsty-for-fashion-soil-association-report.pdf
[4] https://www.globalfashionagenda.com/publications-and-policy/pulse-of-the-industry/