Brands are turning to sustainable clothing in a big way. Denmark’s Denim Project is aiming to save 70 million liters of fresh water over the next two months as part of a plan to drive innovation in the resource intensive industry. It says that 15 per cent of cotton is wasted every year during the manufacturing process, enough to produce three T-shirts for each person on the planet. Cotton is very water intensive. Waste cotton equates to 38.5 billion liters of fresh water, which could provide drinking water to 25 million people a year.

Subsequently, Denim Project has designed a fabric made of 98 per cent production waste, with stretch fabric, the remaining two per cent, being the only new material. Waste material, leftover from the clothes manufacturing process, is sorted into color and spun into yarn, which is then reused to make the new garment. The process uses no dyes and saves a kilogram of cotton per item, which the company estimates is equivalent to 11,000 liters of water.

On same lines, high street fashion brand H&M’s new denim styles are made using cotton recycled from textiles collected at the brand’s stores. Currently it is able to use 20 per cent recycled cotton from collected clothes but is investing in new technology that will enable it to increase this share.