Bluejeans.

Introduction

The bluejeans story begins in that hotbed of haute couture, Bavaria, which also gave the world leather hotpants (lederhosen). Levi Strauss left southern Germany for the United States in 1847 and by the 1870s was running a prosperous dry goods store in San Francisco, where the gold rush boom had created heavy demand for tough work clothes. Running out of canvas, Strauss turned to upholstery fabric (denim, from the French serge de Nimes), dyed it blue, and sold pairs of Levi's jeans for $1.46 apiece. Jeans are still made for work, but they're also for play and for showing off; high-end pairs sell for hundreds of dollars and in 1999 a run of pre-wrecked Gucci bluejeans sold out for $3,700 each. The average U.S. consumer owns seven pairs of jeans.

Fate

Recycling of textiles, including denim, is an old practice. Manufacturers' cutting scraps are collected and returned to mills for reprocessing as rags and wipes or for re-spinning into new fabrics. Recycling rates generally remain low, however. Jeans themselves sometimes follow this path, but they also gradually disappear into dryer lint or are reincarnated as pocket purses, quilts, placemats, pot holders, book covers, pencil cases (pencils too), paper, insulation, and a bewildering variety of other products. Many pairs are simply thrown out and landfilled, where the chemicals incorporated into fabric or dyes retard biodegradation.

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Manufacture

It takes up to nine months to design a pair of jeans and get it into stores, partly because "kind of blue" won't do and designers repeatedly exchange color swatches with manufacturers while searching for the perfect shade. Things speed up at the plants, many of them in developing countries (Mexico, Bangladesh, Costa Rica). Garment workers there, mostly young women, cut and sew denim fabric pieces under quota systems that set a breakneck pace. In one case study, a worker in Tehuacan, Mexico, sewed waistbands on more than 100 pairs of jeans every hour while breathing contaminated air, worrying about the developing numbness in her fingers, and earning US$5.20 per day. The jeans retailed in the United States for $54 a pair.

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Raw Materials

Jeans are cotton; the blue is indigo dye. Cotton is grown in at least 50 countries, but the top five producers (China, United States, India, Pakistan, and Brazil) account for 80 percent of the roughly 88 million bales per year produced worldwide. (A bale is about 480 pounds, or 218 kilograms, and can make 1,200 t-shirts). Much of that cotton is genetically modified. Cotton is a thirsty crop--up to two inches (51 millimeters) of water a week, very often delivered by irrigation--and typically requires careful tending and large quantities of pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers. (In 1998, cotton absorbed almost one-quarter of global insecticide production, according to Pesticide Action Network.) It also takes up a lot of land suitable for food crops.

Indigo dyeing began before 2500 BCE, probably in India. Indigo dyes traditionally were made from plant sources, the richest being the tropical leguminous plants of the genus Indigofera. Until sea trade with India opened around 1500, Europeans relied mainly on the inferior yields of plants such as woad, dissolving the indigo in stale urine to make a dye solution. Around 1900, a commercially viable synthetic indigo was developed and rapidly replaced plant sources. Current production of synthetic indigo, made from coal or oil, approaches 20,000 tons per year and releases significant amounts of toxins such as cyanide into surface waters.