Ethical Fashion

Rapanui is an Eco-Fashion company from the Isle of Wight, that makes Organic, Ethical clothing using Renewable Energy with award-winning traceability. Rapanui is about making eco-fashion cool.

Rapanui Eco Latest

Ethical Fashion

Fairtrade

Environental Policy Statement

The Trouble with cotton

Water Conservation

It can take more than 20,000 litres of water to produce 1kg of cotton, equivalent to a single T-shirt and pair of jeans. That’s enough to fill a hundred bath tubs or half a small swimming pool. Typically this water is found by diverting rivers into the fields to irrigate the crop. The result can be devastating to people, the environment and eco systems downstream.

water conservation in clothing manufacture

The hunger for more cotton profit drove the USSR to divert the once prosperous Aral Sea into its satellite states’ irrigation systems only 20 years ago– the result, above, means that what was one of the four largest lakes in the world is now a desert.

The intense water needs of cotton, organic or not, is why we chose to work in a region (Ahmadabad in India) that receives up to 95% of its water from the monsoon rain. This was an important consideration for us, as the monsoon rain reduces the need for large-scale irrigation projects normally associated with conventional cotton farming, which often deprive local villages of scarce water resources by draining lakes and rivers.

Our products require less water to grow.

Water Conservation at Rapanui

Rapanui 3 stage, closed loop, reverse osmosis water-filtration process.
95% of all the dyewater is reused. (5% evaporates.)

How about the water used in dyeing?

For the vast majority of our products, the processing of the dye effluent takes place in a controlled closed-loop purification system that uses treatment ponds, sand filtration and reverse osmosis to convert the wastewater into clean water.
Closed loop water Filtration
•    Waste water -93% reclaimed (the rest is lost to evaporation)
•    Waste products – negligible
•    Damage to local water systems – nil

This is done in a 5 stage process using a reverse-osmosis sand filter. This is so effective that the water coming out is cleaner than the water going in.

Why organic?

•    Organic cotton root systems are deeper
•    Soil containing organic matter has greater water retention
•    Nitrogen fertilisers are needed for conventional cotton. To produce just one tonne takes one tonne of oil, seven tonnes of greenhouse gasses and one hundred tonnes of water.

So overall, shopping at Rapanui buys you ethical fashion with solid water conservation strategies in place.