it's not easy being jeans; Our blues are far from being legitimately green.

Byline: Jane Herman

Imagine, for a moment, growing a garden with decomposed denim. "A truly sustainable blue jean would be so safe that if you put it in a compost pile, over time it'd turn back into nutrition for your tomato plants," says Rebecca Calahan Klein of the Organic Exchange, a nonprofit organization that, simply put, helps bring fashion to the farm. "With clothes, we like to think of them going back into the ground."

It's a lovely idea, if not a perfect one, but consider, too, what it would require: first, organically grown cotton to make the denim, without the addition of synthetic fibers like polyester, nylon, and Lycra. All of the dyeing and washing would have to be safe and environmentally sound, so no thiox (for the indigo), potassium permanganate (for the distressing), sandblasting (for the worn-in look), or resin (for that 3-D wrinkle effect) allowed. Stonewashing, too, has to go because although the required pumice stone is natural, the strip-mining process that extracts it from the Earth is highly destructive, not to mention illegal in parts of the United States. The tons of water drawn in the laundries would have to be purified on-site and reused, or at least neutralized of chemicals, and under no circumstances could any of it run off into the ocean. Next, the finishings_-rivets, buttons, labels-would have to be biodegradable and culled from recycled materials. And last, to reduce the carbon footprint left by transporting the jeans, say, from the organic-cotton farm in Turkey to the dye house in Los Angeles, then to the factory in Mexico, and finally to the shop in Manhattan, all of the growing, milling, manufacturing, and selling should really take place locally. "Obviously," Klein says frankly, "we're not there yet."

Where are we, then, if we want to wear jeans with a clear conscience? Loving the ones we own less because of the damage they've already done is not the answer. Nor is throwing them away-we'd actually do more good wearing our favorite offenders forever. We're not, Klein reminds me, supposed to let perfection be the enemy of the good. "Sustainability," she says, "happens one step at a time."

The companies investing in eco-friendly jeans are of two minds: Offer a limited selection of pieces made of green materials like organic cotton, Tencel, and regenerative bamboo, or commit to using a percentage of these materials, however small, in production across the board. Habitual, which began showing styles made of a bamboo-cotton blend (25 percent bamboo, 75 percent cotton) this spring, and will collaborate with designer Susan Cianciolo on a recycled-denim collection next fall, is in the former category, along with Levi's and Sweden's Nudie jeans. Edun, founded on fair and sustainable employment methods; Loomstate, which uses 100 percent organic cotton; and Cheap Monday, the Swedish jeans label most famous for being ingeniously affordable, are members of the latter faction. Their thinking is that consistency in product and/or process will save the cause from becoming a trend, fated to doom. And that in time, the small supply of organic cotton in the world-only 1 percent of the 76 million acres harvested today is certified organic-will grow to meet, one hopes, the resulting demand.

"The five-year goal is to have 50 percent of every item in the line be ecologically made," says Adam Friberg of Cheap Monday. "For us, to have ...