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Your favorite pair of jeans may have traveled around the world through cotton farms, dye houses, wash facilities, and factories before ending up in your closet. The denim may have never been worn, but it is stonewashed, sanded, chemically faded, or laser-treated to look like it.
Those processes can require significant amounts of water, energy, and chemicals—part of the reason denim has become a growing target for sustainability efforts across the fashion industry, which is among the world’s biggest producers of greenhouse gas emissions.
Brands are responding to wider awareness by marketing their jeans as “sustainable,” touting regenerative cotton, recycled fibers, and low-water manufacturing techniques. But figuring out if that’s true is far more complicated. For one, sustainability is difficult to define—and there isn’t a universal set of standards.
Recently, Chinese fast-fashion giant Shein acquired Everlane, a brand known for transparency and sustainability efforts, highlighting broader tensions over scale and affordability. Improvements in sustainable processes typically cost more, making it difficult for companies with fast production cycles and low prices to adopt them widely. Consumers are left to navigate a complicated web of tradeoffs involving farming practices, chemical processes, labor ethics, and a wide range of prices.
Experts say consumers should be wary of vague sustainability claims and instead look for brands that provide detailed information about their sourcing and manufacturing processes.
Dana Davis, a strategic fashion adviser who led sustainability efforts for the label Mara Hoffman, encouraged shoppers to look beyond a single product page and examine whether brands discuss labor rights, textiles, and manufacturing sites across their entire business—not just in a capsule collection.
But one of the simplest ways to reduce denim’s environmental footprint is also the least glamorous: to buy fewer jeans, wear them longer, wash them less, and shop secondhand.
This article was provided by The Associated Press.