The Impacts of One Denim Jeans Pant on the Environment Through the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) Approach: A Case Study

Abstract

Denim jeans pants have become one of the most in-demand and common wears among people of all age groups, social strata, gender, and geographical region. The increasing demand for denim jeans pants has made it hard to find a wardrobe that does not consist of denim jeans pants. For the production of denim jeans pants, it has to go through different phases i.e. cotton cultivation, denim and garment manufacturing process, consumer use, and disposal. In each of these stages, it consumes extreme amounts of water, energy, chemicals, manpower, and emits harmful gasses which are degrading the environment. Thus, this paper studied the impact caused by one denim jeans pants during the gate-to-gate phase (garment manufacturing process) by focusing on water, energy, and climate change due to the release of carbon dioxide gasses into the environment. The GaBi software was used to analyze the impact caused by denim jeans pants during gate to gate phase. Moreover, Microsoft Excel was also used to study the environmental degradation caused by denim jeans pants. This study found that for the garment manufacturing of one denim jeans pants, Universal Jeans Ltd uses 19 gallons of water. Mainly, groundwater is used in the manufacturing process of denim jeans pants which is leading to a decline in groundwater and destroying the water table. Moreover, 193 MJ of energy is consumed to manufacture one pair of denim jeans pants. Further, in a day, 9,650,000 MJ of energy is consumed by the garment factory which is equivalent to the energy that can be used to power an average house for 34 months in Bangladesh. In addition to this, 29 kg of carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere during the garment production of one denim jeans pants which is equivalent to the carbon dioxide release by burying 8.1 kg of coal. The findings from this study highlight the need to shift towards alternative methods to decrease water consumption, energy use, and carbon dioxide emission during garment production of denim jeans pants.