Levi's Goes Green With Waste​<​Less Jeans

Levi's Goes Green With Waste​<​Less Jeans 

Most apparel companies work hard to give their clothes the sheen of sophistication or whimsy. Levi Strauss is trying hard not to. When its latest line of jeans arrives in stores early next year, the pitch will be: “These jeans are made of garbage.” Crushed brown and green plastic bottles will be on display nearby. Eight of those are blended into each pair of Levi’s new Waste‹Less jeans, which are composed of at least 20 percent recycled plastic.

The Waste‹Less denim collection, unveiled on Oct. 16, is part of a bigger push to reduce Levi’s environmental impact throughout the entire process of making jeans. “We want to build sustainability into everything we do,” says Michael Kobori, the vice president of supply chain social and environmental sustainability. Resource scarcity and increasingly volatile prices for cotton make this a necessity more than a choice. Plus outside groups are putting pressure on big consumer companies such as Levi’s to be stewards of the environment. “We expect brands we trust to take care of us, to keep us honest,” says Eric Olson, the senior vice president of BSR, an environmental group that works with businesses. “We don’t want to hear that we’re ruining someone’s life or destroying the planet. We don’t want to pay more, but we want companies to take care of it.”

Other apparel makers are trying to be green too, of course. Nike (NKE) and Gap (GPS) have their own sustainability programs, and Patagonia has long supported a small ecosystem of earth-friendly suppliers. But as the biggest maker of jeans in the world, with sales of $4.8 billion in 2011, Levi’s efforts command attention.

In 2007, Levi’s was among the first in the apparel industry to conduct a life-cycle assessment of some of its major products. It measured the environmental impact of its 501 jeans and Dockers from cotton fields to consumers’ closets. The results were surprising. Levi’s found that 49 percent of the water use during the lifetime of a pair of 501 jeans occurred at the very beginning, with cotton farmers. Another 45 percent of the water was used by consumers to wash their jeans, typically about 100 times. Levi’s customers were also responsible for nearly 60 percent of the energy used to make and care for a pair of jeans. It turned out that the manufacturing process, where Levi’s can exert the most control, had the least impact on water and energy use.

So Levi’s joined the Better Cotton Initiative, a group of companies that work with local nongovernmental organizations in Pakistan, India, Brazil, and Mali to teach farmers how to grow cotton with less water. The first of the cotton was harvested last year, and Levi’s blended its share into more than 5 million pairs of jeans. Each has about 5 percent of the low-water cotton, though the members of the initiative agreed not to label products using that special cotton as such. By not touting the cotton’s provenance on labels, they hope to avoid creating too great a demand for the current limited supply. Levi’s goal is to use a 20 percent blend of the new cotton in its products by 2015. (Organic cotton, grown without pesticides, has proved too expensive, and Levi’s discontinued its line of organic jeans in 2008.)

In 2010, Levi’s also began a marketing campaign to encourage people to wash their jeans less often, in cold water only, and line-dry them. It changed the care tag to say so and even held an online contest for consumers to suggest their own air-drying ideas. It also recommended that consumers donate old jeans to Goodwill rather than throw them away.

Levi’s started working on ways to use less water in the manufacturing of its jeans, too. “You can’t add sustainability midway through the process, you have to start with the blank page,” says Jonathan Kirby, head of merchandise and design. “Up until then it was: ‘What can we add to make it look different?’ ” says Kobori. “They flipped that thinking. ‘What can we take out and still get the same look?’”

The standard process of distressing jeans involved washing them with lots of pumice stones repeatedly, using roughly 45 liters of water per pair. Kirby’s team experimented with using no water at all. “We learned that if you put a lot of stones into a dry machine for one hour you’ll end up with rags,” he says. So they brought back the water—just less of it. Eventually, by using ceramic stones and rubber balls and changing the filtration system in the washing machines, engineers came up with jeans that, on average, use only four liters of water to achieve the distressed look.
source:businessweek.com