“Water is a limited resource, and we should treat it like gold,” said a speaker at the Embassy of Sweden’s event on water use in textile production last week, which the United States Fashion Industry Association attended. But just how does the fashion industry promote sustainable water use and stewardship? Experts from governments, NGOs, and the fashion industry itself provided some insight on how to address pressing water-use issues. 

Following a welcome from the Swedish Ambassador to the United States Bjorn Lyrvall, Katerina Veem of Swedish Water House, a non-governmental organization that discusses Sweden’s role in global water issues, introduced the topic and the importance of water as a key issue. She shared a chart prepared by the World Economic Forum that highlights the high-risk issues and notes that water—both the availability of water and the need for clean water—remains a top concern.

Swedish Water House’s Swedish Textile Water Initiative (STWI) was featured at the event. The initiative began four years ago as a partnership with Swedish textile and leather retailers to produce guidelines for sustainable water use in textile and leather manufacturing processes, but today the organization is active in Bangladesh and India with plans for expansion in Turkey, China, and Ethiopia, too.

The speakers also included industry representatives from H&M and Indiska, who shared their experiences to implement water stewardship in the fashion industry. They admitted that most of the work on water issues is still quite basic—such as educating companies and manufacturers about the impact of their operations on water. But these brands are committed to water stewardship—in fact, H&M has partnered with the World Wildlife Fund on the issue.

One key success has been to provide water meters to factories so they can monitor water quality. The Swedish government provided funding to provide the meters for free for one year, though factories will need to pay for the meters after. Their positive report is that the companies that looked at the linkages between water use, chemical use, and energy use took action to save costs—and their sustainability efforts also helped them to attract new buyers, showing that sustainability makes business sense.

This is just one example of collaboration to address water-use issues, and a variety of stakeholders ranging from government to savvy startups have been taking action, too.

Gustavo Delgado of the U.S. State Department spoke briefly about LAUNCH: Systems Challenge Green Chemistry, a special partnership between the State Department, NASA, USAID, and Nike to transform the system of materials and manufacturing, which can have dramatic social, environmental and economic impacts on the world. They lead an annual competition for innovative projects to improve sustainability, and one of the winners this year was Nano-Dye Technologies, which focuses on sustainable textile dying.

CEO Water Mandate spoke about their work on an apparel project in Vietnam with Nike, Levi Strauss & Co., Nautica, and H&M. The organization is developing a new portal for information on sustainability issues for the textile and apparel industry.

And the Water Resources Institute has a special project, aqueduct.wri.org, which measures and maps water risks around the world to help stakeholders address them.

The Water Resources Institute has a special project – aqueduct.wri.org     the other speakers used images from that project to show the global locations with the biggest water issues. 

So many water-use issues—but so many ideas! What’s the key takeaway? All stakeholders need to get involved in water stewardship—and with education, collaboration, and innovation, the industry can support sustainable water use while improving their business operations, too.

For more information, on STWI or water-use issues, visit www.stwi.org.