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With droughts on the rise, brands are facing increased pressure to implement new strategies to reduce their water usage.
French luxury conglomerate LVMH plans to reduce its overall water consumption by 30 per cent by 2030, the group announced on Monday. The news comes four months after the French government unveiled new legislation intended to reduce the use of water and ensure the country’s access to water remains throughout the year, after the country experienced its driest winter since 1959.
Today’s announcement is an extension of LVMH’s ‘Life 360’ initiative — an environmental performance roadmap that outlines targets over 2023, 2026 and 2030, which was first unveiled in April 2021. The group says controlling its water consumption is “integral” to its environmental strategy, and it measures water usage across global activities annually.
Experts say target setting is a first step towards achieving change, but must be followed up with action. “Ambitious targets, accompanied by a wider plan to ensure they are met, are often key to reducing impact,” says Cate Lamb, global director for water security at environmental non-profit CDP (formally known as Carbon Disclosure Project). “Public disclosure against these targets allows civil society, consumers, investors and purchasers to hold companies to account. To have a long-term impact all businesses need to place environmental awareness and action at the heart of how they are run.”
In order to hit its target, LVMH has outlined five key objectives: use environmental labels to help increase customer awareness; continue its regenerative agriculture programme, which it says “aims to improve soil quality and thus its capacity to capture and retain water”; implement new manufacturing processes that consume less water, including recycling systems in its distilleries and Loro Piana workshops; reuse treated wastewater and recover rainwater across its production facilities and value chain; and improve its measurement of water consumption throughout the LVMH value chain. Loro Piana has already reduced its water consumption by 25 per cent between 2019 and 2022, thanks to its use of wastewater recycling equipment in its main factory, the company said.
Historically overlooked, water usage is becoming an increasing concern for brands as droughts become more frequent across the globe. British heritage brand Burberry and LVMH rival Kering are among those starting to address their water footprint, but we are yet to see an industry-wide shift. Some brands are reconsidering the materials they use and where they source them, given that, traditionally, cotton and particularly denim require significant amounts of water, for example.
Few apparel companies are aware of their water usage, research by CDP suggests. Of the 56 apparel companies that responded to a CDP water questionnaire in 2022, 27 per cent said a sufficient amount of high-quality freshwater is vital to the success of their business. CDP said this was an “unfeasibly low percentage given the critical materiality of water at all stages of textile production”. It also noted an apparent lack of awareness from respondents regarding the risk of water pollution incidents, and that more than 60 per cent of the companies did not consider their suppliers to be stakeholders in water risk assessments.
“The apparel and textile industry is one of the largest industries in the world, both in terms of annual revenue and environmental degradation. Billions of cubic metres of water are needed each year to meet global demand for clothing and textiles, exacerbating global water security and compromising the availability of good quality freshwater, needed for health, livelihoods and ecosystems ” says CDP’s Lamb. “This figure is set to increase unless the industry takes urgent steps to ensure water is valued appropriately.”
Experts say that brands should look to natural alternatives, such as vegetable dyes, to help reduce the amount of chemicals entering our water systems. “For systemic and long-term change we really have to find alternatives to chemicals that we re using in clothing,” says Lisa Mazzotta, producer of the River Blue documentary, which explored some of the world’s most polluted rivers. “There are a number of highly toxic chemicals that are being used in the dyeing process, and several processes to create the synthetic fibres, that are not only in our clothing, but are then also going into the wastewater production, that ends up going into our waterways, rivers and oceans.”
Despite concerns about droughts, global water usage has been increasing at an annual rate of 1 per cent over the last 40 years, according to the UN World Water Development Report 2023. By 2050, this could mean an increase in usage of between 20 to 30 per cent. Not only does the fashion industry consume large amounts of water to produce garments, it subsequently produces high volumes of wastewater. According to The Environmental Impacts of Fast Fashion on Water Quality report, the fashion industry consumes 79 trillion of water annually, contributing approximately 20 per cent of global industrial wastewater. On a global scale, the economic loss due to extreme weather conditions and natural disasters is around $421 trillion, from 2000 to 2018, with droughts accounting for $372 billion, according to an IPCC report.
LVMH says it will unveil a qualitative target for reducing its water consumption footprint to improve the quality of discharges into natural environments, and will be validated by the new Science Based Targets for Nature by the end of this year. As it stands, a large portion of water consumption in the fashion industry comes from the growing process, says Mazzotta. This is closely followed by the dyeing process and the treatment of synthetic fibres such as polyester.
“The next step is for all the big players to go ‘let’s reduce our water usage and and let s tackle this big issue of wastewater management’,” says Mazzotta
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