Water Aware is a significant new milestone in Volcom’s journey to sustainability, a commitment to responsible manufacturing practices, better fiber sourcing, assessing our impacts and meaningful give backs that began 12 years ago. The release of the Volcom Fall 2019 collection is marked by the worldwide introduction our new Water Aware denim jeans across all men’s, women’s and youth styles. By introducing reformulated water-saving techniques in the finishing processes during the production of Volcom jeans, we have been able to achieve an average savings of 13 liters of water per jean. And we are not stopping there.
At Volcom we’re committed to addressing the environmental impacts associated with the production of our clothing, and are continually seeking ways to eliminate or reduce these impacts. After evaluating all the stages required to produce a pair of denim jeans, the impact we could most immediately address was the usage of water in the finishing processes of our jeans.
The Volcom production team worked with the factories that produce our denim to switch to enzyme wash and ozone finishing techniques and combine traditionally separate wet cycles into single processes. Inspired by the Water<Less™ techniques developed by Levi’s and using their ‘Open Source: Water Innovation’ guide, this is something we hope that other brands adopt as best practices too. To date Volcom has saved over 4.5 million liters* of water since the program's introduction in 2019.
Water Aware is the next chapter in Volcom’s journey to sustainability following our Fair Labor Association accreditation, and is in line with our ambition to make the largest impact by introducing more sustainable materials or processes across to the products that we produce in the greatest volume. It follows the similar strategy around our other high volume categories, like men’s Mod-Tech trunks, Frickin chinos and women’s swim, where we introduced REPREVE® and Econyl® recycled fibers, respectively. With pants being one Volcom’s largest categories and jeans representing a weighty portion of the category, being able to reduce our water usage by almost 40% in the production of all our denim, the realized savings is tremendous.
Looking to the future, Volcom will continue to increase the average water savings per jean by adding more denim washes with even higher efficiency gains to our line and exploring other stages in a jeans’ cradle to the grave lifecycle where we can reduce water usage.
