A CASE STUDY FOR WATER FOOTPRINT ASSESSMENT OF A DENIM PRODUCT

The awareness of the fact that the leading cause of the bad environmental conditions in our world is the human factor, has been increasing in recent years. This awareness enables people, companies, and organizations to decrease water consumption, to decrease carbon emission, to decrease using harmful chemicals, consequently people who are aware of global warming and depletion of resources are taking actions to save our planet for a sustainable life. Textile is one of the big sectors affecting the environmental pollution in a very bad way. For that reason, the present water footprint research was conducted on textiles and a denim company was especially chosen to examine the water footprint because of denim sector’s being one of the biggest polluters and wasting water in a huge amount in the textile industry. Firstly, the limits of the research were obtained as finishing operations under the scope of water footprint. The production steps and wastewater occurring points were obtained carefully for different denim finishing processes. After that stage, personal water consumption during denim apparel production was examined in detail. To create a good inventory analysis, many meetings were performed, and a survey was prepared to collect the data about wastewater of the company. By the help of this water footprint evaluation, the processes that create the most wastewater and the distribution of water footprint according to processes and other sources that cause water consumption were determined for one pair of denim trouser accepted as a functional unit in the context of the research.