TORN AND TORMENTED DENIM -AT WHAT COST TO THE ENVIRONMENT?

This season's 'most wanted', hottest items, introduced to the fashion scene under the Pierre Balmain designer label are acid washed distressed jeans, designed by Christophe Decarnin. Stocks of these are already depleted in many of their designer stores globally. Other fashion brands such as Rock and Republic and Diesel have also followed suit creating their own versions of tattered denim fashion. Celebrities such as Cory Kennedy and Kate Beckinsale have been caught on camera sporting styled and refashioned revivals of the 80's denim fashion phenomena.

Faded, ripped scrunched and 'distressed' to the ultimate degree the Balmain designer jeans are controversy led fashion items due mainly to the price tag of RM5000 plus for a pair! However, hot this distressed denim might appear on the runway there is an more depressing tale to tell apart from the overpricing, regarding the production of denim in general and the techniques and practices employed in the stonewashing and distressing process.

There are huge ecological and ethical concerns as this business is an enormous affair. To give an example 450 million pairs of jeans are sold in USA alone each year. The majority of which will have been coloured with toxic dyes, acid bathed, sandblasted and chemically doused to give the aged , worn in look we all so desire.

The life cycle of denim starts with the cotton boll, amid the vast cotton crops recorded as covering 2.4% of the world's farm land. If not organically grown the valuable crops will be drenched in toxic pesticides to protect them from insects and weeds. Organophosphates are used which are poisonous and ultimately pass into the soil and reek havoc with wildlife.

Cotton fibres are spun into yarn and the denim yarn is "sized" using starch to give it strength and "mercerized" in caustic soda. Starch is biodegradable but if released into the rivers the microbes that devour it also consume the oxygen. This in turn kills off the aquatic life in the water as does the toxic caustic soda.

Other shocking facts are that it takes 1,500 gallons of water to produce 1.5 lbs of cotton needed to make one pair of jeans. To achieve the correct blue shade, the denim in doused in vats of synthetic indigo. Environmental regulations are not upheld in many developing countries such as Mexico, where water and dyes are cheap. Here the old indigo dye once used will be released into the waterways untreated. Apart from the initial dyeing the stone washing or distressing of the denim is achieved by repeated washing and rinsing and bleaching, chemical blasting with such toxic substances such silica, dye stripped or bleached with potassium permanganate. All toxic to wildlife if let into the waterways and to the workers who breathe it in. Tehuacan in Mexican is a huge area of factories dedicated to denim production, here quite often the rivers turn blue with the cocktail of dye, bleach and detergents frequently let out into the waterways untreated.

There are however many up and coming companies producing friendly denim using organic cotton and more eco friendly ways of distressing the fabric, such as using ozone to fade the denim It is the responsibility of the consumer to search these enlightened businesses out by checking for labels such as Fair Trade and Global Organic Standard certification and the Recycling logo.

Some designers have solved the problem in another way by recycling old denim, naturally aged and worn by time, and re-styled and modelled it into new and inventive fashion designs. Denim seems to be an ongoing favourite on the fashion scene and as such needs to clean up its act totally to keep in step with the environmental and ethical requirements that are so rightly being put into place as a global fashion and textile effort.

Tehuacan Mexico is known as the "heartland of Mexico's denim industry," a heart that sometimes launders enough jeans to bleed blue dye and bleach into rivers used to irrigate corn fields. And, no, this is not how blue corn tortillas came about. As reported in a PlanetArk story, "Dozens of industrial laundries, some of which put the finishing touches to jeans for export, discharge a cocktail of bleach, dye and detergents into Tehuacan's wide valley with almost no government controls, residents say...Water from the denim laundries runs through Tehuacan, where it mixes with municipal sewage and is discharged untreated in a foaming green torrent to a river that feeds irrigation systems in the downstream village of San Diego Chalma." Historically, this problem is not unique. While USEPA was first promulgating industrial wastewater effluent standards...back in the old days when jeans were made in the US, from start to finish... the same thing likely happened. Toilet paper making and beet processing too. For example, those who recall the days of "avacado green" floral scented toilet paper sold in the US might also recall the green discharges that sometimes resulted. Sugar beets: self explanatory.