(1) The biggest fashion trend in recent years is “fast fashion”—the mass production of trendy, inexpensive clothing with lightning-quick turnaround. This is a hugely wasteful, global environmental and human rights disaster, according to bestselling journalist Dana Thomas in her new book Fashionopolis.

(2) Making the industry’s 80 billion garments per year requires huge amounts of water and toxic chemicals. It employs every sixth person on Earth—most in dangerous conditions for very little money. Fast fashion also produces mountains of clothes that go unsold or are discarded and end up in garbage dumps and landfills.

(3) There is no single solution for these problems of ecological damage, exploitation and waste, but there is hope for the future. Consumers, retailers and innovators are pursuing a variety of options for sustainability, such as buying secondhand clothes; renting outfits; recycling clothes into new, reusable fibers; 3D printing clothes on demand; biofabrication; reshoring; and using organic and natural fibers. And just buying less.

(4) You are probably wearing jeans as you read this. If you’re not, chances are you wore them yesterday. Or you will tomorrow. At any given moment, anthropologists believe, half the world’s population is sporting jeans. Five billion pairs are produced annually. The average American owns seven—one for each day of the week—and buys four new pairs every year. “I wish I had invented blue jeans,” the French couturier Yves Saint Laurent confessed. “They have expression, modesty, sex appeal, simplicity—all I hope for my clothes.”

(5) Denim remained a niche textile until the early 1870s, when a tailor named Jacob Davis asked his fabric supplier, Levi Strauss, for help mass-producing his most recent design: workpants with metal rivets at key stress points. If Strauss would cover the hefty $68 patenting fee, Davis proposed, the two men could be business partners. Today, Levi Strauss & Co. still design and sell the majority of jeans. It is one of the most successful apparel brands, ever.

(6) And blue jeans’ popularity steadily grew, until they received an unexpected bump in the 1970s—from all places, Seventh Avenue.

(7) With the women’s liberation movement and the popularity of more casual dress, New York’s fashion designers dreamed up a new fashion category: designer jeans. “Jeans are sex,” Calvin Klein said. “The tighter they are, the better they sell.”

(8) To hammer home his point, in 1980, Klein cast 15-year-old actress-model Brooke Shields for his jeans commercial. “You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins?” she purred in her childlike voice, as she sat spread-eagle in a pair of his jeans and a taupe blouse. “Nothing.” The ad was so provocative, the New York affiliates of ABC and CBS promptly banned it. But it had already worked its spell: Klein sold 400,000 pairs the week following the ad’s debut, then two million a month after that. Jean sales rocketed to record heights: more than half a billion were purchased in 1981 alone.

(9) Until the 1970s, a good many jeans sold had been made of stiff, shrink-to-fit—or “unsanforized”—denim. To soften them, you simply had to wear them. A lot. It took a good six months to properly break in jeans. After a couple of years—years—the hems and pocket edges might start to fray, or a knee would split open. The fabric faded to a powdery blue with some whiskering—the sunburst-like streaks that radiate from the fly. Time and dedication were required to push your jeans to peak fabulousness.

(10) That is, until the popularization of stone washing in the 1980s. Unsanforized jeans were thrown into industrial washers with pumice stones and tumbled until the denim was sufficiently abraded. Sometimes jeans were further distressed with acid, sandpaper, rasps and files to mimic the previously hard-won wear and tear.

(11) Distressed, whiskered jeans continue to drive the global market and have been the cause of ecological and health calamity. What could be done about finishing? Surely, in our world of rapid technological advancement, there must be a way to solve the problem.

(12) Denim industry consultants Jose Vidal and his nephew Enrique Silla, based in Valencia, Spain, set out to develop a cleaner, safer three-step process called Jeanologia.

(13) Silla led me to the lab to see the system in action. In the laser room, in 10 or 11 seconds, the jeans were as faded and destroyed as my old shrink-to-fit 501s after three years of hard living.

(14) Next, a dryer-like tumbler uses ozone to fade jeans. Using stratospheric ozone, or “good ozone,” in finishing is “like putting a garment in the sun for a month, except we can do it in 20 minutes,” Silla explained, and with a fraction of the energy or water the old process required.

(15) Finally, we visited the washroom, where the e-Flow machine washes jeans among microscopic bubbles. “Nanobubbles do the softening, tinting and stonewash without the stones, all at once,” Silla said. There is no water treatment afterward and the water that is used can be recycled for 30 days. “We are not at zero water stage yet,” he said. “But we are getting there.”

According to the author, the following are solutions for fast fashion problems EXCEPT________.