Db
Db

Water & Chemicals

Where the water actually goes

Almost none of it is us. Our offices use water for taps, showers and toilets. The water that matters is upstream, at the mills: turning white fabric into a Db bag takes dyeing, coating and finishing, which are the wettest and most chemically intensive steps in the whole process. They happen mainly in Vietnam, Taiwan, South Korea and China, in regions where water is already under pressure — when it runs short there, dye houses get shut off.

So that's where we put the effort.

What we're doing

  • Scaling dope-dyed polyester, which colors fabric using far less water than conventional dyeing.
  • Choosing mills that have water management systems, or helping them build one.
  • By 2035, all of our significant suppliers in high water-risk areas will maintain certified water-management and climate resilience systems. We rank suppliers by how much we spend with them and work down that list, and we use the WWF Water Risk Filter to identify which basins count as high risk.
  • Founding member of STICA+, where we ran our first proper water analysis and set our first company water targets.

Chemicals

None of our products intentionally contain substances the EU classes as of concern or of very high concern. Our restricted substances requirements are part of the code of conduct every supplier signs. Every year we run random checks on finished goods and incoming components to verify that our processes and products comply with our Restricted Substance List.

What isn't working.

We can't yet measure most of it. Water data from our supply chain comes from a small number of suppliers reporting through the Higg Index, and the rest is estimated. Wet processing is also the place where we have the least leverage — we don't run those mills, and changing how they dye fabric is a conversation, not an instruction. Both of those are the honest reason our water work moves slower than our climate work.

On biodiversity

We don't run a separate biodiversity program. For a business like ours the things that damage ecosystems are climate change, chemicals, water and waste — so we work on those directly rather than adding a headline.