Water creates a provoke-awakening dilemma that we at Vakigrad have put a lot of thought into.
According to the United Nations, access to clean freshwater becomes ever more scarce. Economic growth and individual wealth are shifting consumer behaviour towards more water consumption.
Diets, for instance, that with economic development have caused humans to go from predominantly starch-based to meat and dairy, which require more water. Take rice and meat production as examples. While producing 1 kg of rice consumes about 3,500 litres of water; 1 kg of beef requires about 15,000 litres to produce. The United Nations says that this dietary shift is the greatest to impact on water consumption over the past 30 years, and is likely to continue well into the middle of the twenty-first century. To make stuff worse, clean freshwater availability is expected to decrease in many regions.
A luxury good is according to economists, such as Hal Varian, a good for which demand increases more than proportionally as income rises. As with the unfortunate development of water, it is becoming a luxury good although most of us consider water being the bare necessity.
The fashion and apparel industry use plenty of water. A single shirt takes about 4,500 liters of water just to be produced. The majority of the world's leather production is guilty in polluting water with chemical metals even though sustainable vegetable tanning processes exist.
That’s why Vakigrad in our effort to meet our principle about cleaner materials has developed leather that is vegetable tanned in cooperation with a tannery that has invested in recycling water. Because after all, access to clean freshwater should not be a luxury to people. It's a necessity.
