Water Stewardship

A single pair of jeans can use up to 3,800 liters of water in its lifetime. The World Economic Forum rates water issues among the top financial risks to the global economy, and the United Nations estimates that 2 billion people live in countries experiencing high water stress. Clean water access is an issue for many and varies geographically. As water stress manifests to different degrees around the world and in the apparel supply chain, we see opportunities to use the science and tools at our disposal to focus our efforts where water savings are most critically needed.

We set geographically contextual water use targets for suppliers based on local water stress, increasing the number of products made in Water<Less® facilities and in facilities that recycle and reuse water. We apply the Jeanologia Environmental Impact Measurement (EIM) platform to track and reduce water use in garment finishing, helping to increase access to clean water for local communities in sourcing locations, and inspire collective action to lessen the apparel industry’s impact on water around the world.

2025 Water Action Strategy

Water is necessary for people, communities and the planet — and to create many of the beloved products our consumers enjoy. LS&Co. has long been working to ensure that water is available for both communities and commerce. In the early 1990s, for example, we established the apparel industry’s first wastewater quality guidelines. In 2019, we published our 2025 Water Action Strategy, which leverages the best and most current publicly available data sources to address water stress in the supply chain. The strategy is the driving force behind our geographically contextual, facility-level targets to address local water stress. We are incorporating these contextual water targets into our Water<Less® program.

As with other LS&Co.-developed resources, we published our Water Action Strategy as an open-source document to inspire collective action and progress across our industry. We share our Water<Less® Technique Manual and Recycle & Reuse Standard and Guidelines. To further extend its benefits, the 2025 Water Action Strategy includes focused strategies to drive resilience beyond manufacturing in areas experiencing high water stress. This is intended to bring greater resilience to our operations and to the communities and watersheds affected by our business.

Water<Less® — Our Flagship Program Evolves

We launched Water<Less®, our comprehensive water stewardship program, in 2010 to maximize water efficiency in apparel production through a series of garment finishing techniques and water recycling guidelines. In FY21, we continued to evolve the program for more positive impacts, including important changes to the ways we track and report Water<Less® progress.

When it was conceived, Water<Less® was a collection of water-saving techniques, all very technical and some quite innovative compared with traditional methods in fabric development and garment finishing. Ten years later, these techniques have become standard practice. While it is positive that these water-saving approaches are now considered standard by many apparel and textile suppliers, we will no longer claim that these techniques “save” water because they have become so widely used, and we will no longer report total liters water saved by Water<Less®. Of course, we will continue working to apply new innovations, and because many of our suppliers operate in geographies of high water stress, we will continue reporting their progress to reduce freshwater use. Through 2021, we have recycled over 11.5 billion liters since 2011, in line with supplier use of our Reuse & Recycle standard and our Water<Less® techniques.

Helping Suppliers Set Contextual Water Targets

We use the World Resources Institute Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas to help us gain a basin-level understanding of the local water stress contexts where we operate. We then categorize our suppliers into areas of low, medium and high water stress. As we work with suppliers on water efficiency targets, the low and medium stress areas receive progressive efficiency targets, while suppliers in areas of high water stress are assigned aggressive absolute water use reduction targets compared to a 2018 base year. All our key suppliers have contextual water targets, and collectively, the targets are intended to contribute to reducing the water used in the manufacturing of our products by 50% in areas of high water stress by 2025.

How Water<Less® Innovation Interacts with Supplier Targets

One of our key 2025 Water Action Strategy intentions is to evolve our Water<Less® program into a facility-level qualification to simplify the program implementation and deepen our impact in local communities. Suppliers can achieve this facility-level Water<Less® qualification by attaining their 2025 facility-level contextual water targets. We have set intermediate reduction targets to serve as milestones for suppliers as they progress to their 2025 target. These intermediate targets will indicate which suppliers are on track and can be considered Water<Less® suppliers for a two-year period. Any products manufactured by a Water<Less® supplier are deemed Water<Less® garments in the marketplace.

Recycle and Reuse in Supplier Facilities

LS&Co.’s efforts to address manufacturing water use and pollution started in 2014, when we authored a standard for water recycling and reuse for manufacturing facilities. Our Recycle & Reuse Standard and Guidelines establish that facilities must adhere to the Zero Discharge of Hazardous Chemicals (ZDHC) Foundation’s wastewater guidelines’ progressive standard and recycle more than 20% of the water used in manufacturing. Between 2011 and the end of 2021, approximately 11.5 billion liters of water have been recycled at product and fabric manufacturing facilities that apply our water Recycle & Reuse Standard or use our Water<Less® techniques.

See our Water Stewardship Data Table for more information on recycled water over the years.

2021 Water Reduction Data Challenges

Our supplier-level data includes verified Higg water use data. LS&Co. engages with our suppliers to review the quality and reasonableness of the data received. Many suppliers do not submit their data on time or at all, which affects our ability to report on our water footprint. Therefore, we also rely on estimates. In addition, the timeline for receiving verified Higg data and ensuring its accuracy can be 10 months to one year, which affects our ability to report in a timely manner.

Water Use in Our Own Facilities

At our company-operated factories in Plock, Poland, and Epping, South Africa, a variety of water-savings processes are in place. Both facilities use Water<Less® production processes and have installed water-efficient retrofits on washing machines. In addition, our facility in South Africa uses 100% recycled water in manufacturing, rather than relying on the stressed local freshwater supply. The facility created an innovative public-private partnership with the Cape Town municipal government to construct a pipeline that returns recycled water from the municipal treatment plant to the industrial area where our factory is located, rather than discharge it to the ocean, as was customary.

These actions allowed our factory to decouple production from Cape Town’s freshwater, helping to protect local supplies and build resilience to future shortages. In addition, LS&Co. grants to The Nature Conservancy’s Greater Cape Town Water Fund enabled training and work for local women who have been removing thirsty invasive shrubs, freeing up more than 120 million liters for the local water supply — part of the 4.8 billion liters of water saved per year under the fund. In FY21, we signed a three-year agreement to continue supporting this program.

Across all our company-operated facilities, including corporate offices, retail stores, distribution centers and factories, our 2021 water footprint was 522 million liters.*
*Water footprint data is for calendar year 2021 because Higg FEM data is reported on a calendar year basis. The footprint includes both actual and estimated water usage.

The Water-Chemical Nexus

Water pollution contributes to water stress, so ensuring that the water put back into the environment is clean and safe is as important as addressing water consumption. In 2020, we met our goal for zero discharge of hazardous chemicals for strategic wet finishing suppliers. Our partnership with the ZDHC Foundation continues contributing to cleaner wastewater from apparel manufacturing. In 2021, we continued working to scale the adoption of ZDHC’s Manufacturing Restricted Substances List (MRSL) and our Screened Chemistry approach to encourage more industry peers to adopt preferred chemical lists and to screen any new formulations for hazards.

Read more about our continued work on safer chemicals.

Partnerships in Water Stewardship

As with our other environmental and social commitments, our progress is stronger when we collaborate with others. For this reason, LS&Co. has been a signatory to the United Nations Global Compact CEO Water Mandate since it began in 2008. The CEO Water Mandate mobilizes business leaders to address global water challenges and advance water stewardship. We are also members of the Water Resilience Coalition, which is working to help align industry peers and NGOs to achieve our shared vision of net-positive water impact in water-stressed basins and drive toward a water-resilient value chain.

Waves for Water

In 2021, the Dockers® brand launched a three-year collaboration with surfer Jon Rose and his foundation Waves for Water to help provide clean drinking water to communities in need. Waves for Water provides access to clean water through portable water filtration systems, digging and renovating borehole wells, and rainwater harvesting and storage systems. Some of these projects are in or near communities where workers in the Dockers® supply chain live. The first items available in the Dockers® Waves for Water collection made their appearance in Spring 2021 — all made with Water<Less® techniques. We also invited the public to donate water filters, with Dockers® matching gifts up to $50,000 and bringing new partners to the Dockers® brand, including Selema Masekela, Arturo Islas Allende and others.

What’s Next – Water Stewardship

We will continue working to refine and strengthen our Water<Less® program, focusing on the facility level for maximum positive impact. This means that mills and factories that meet their facility-level contextual targets will qualify as Water<Less® facilities, as will all the fabric or products coming from those facilities. Implementing such a facility-level approach both simplifies the administration of the Water<Less® program and amplifies our impact, because the scope of facility-level targets also encompasses other brands’ production volume manufactured in the same supplier facility. In this way, the net result of meeting our 50% reduction target in areas of high water stress will have positive ripple effects beyond LS&Co.’s products.

Although we provide our suppliers the flexibility to choose their preferred approach to meet their facility-level targets, our existing Water<Less® techniques, EIM measurement software, Recycle & Reuse Standard and the PaCT partnership will remain pillars of our new water strategy and serve as key tools for facilities to meet their targets.

Our water stewardship efforts will continue to involve sourcing more sustainable fibers. For example, one of our fiber innovations, cottonized hemp, is much less water-intensive than conventional cotton production and has the added benefit of relying on rainwater instead of irrigated water that could be used for other productive purposes. Our product circularity work, such as using Circulose® — which includes fiber spun from discarded denim — also benefits our water efforts because it reduces the amount of water required to create virgin materials.*
*Circulose® is a registered trademark of Re: NewCell AB.