Why Levi’s blue jeans are turning green

The consumer will want sustainable fashion – it will be an expectation just like quality and styling and pricing. I think we’ll also see consumers much more knowledgeable about sustainability. Take something that was not so obvious five years ago: the embedded carbon in a garment. Now, it’s something that we’re actually testing, so that we can offer the information to consumers. So, just imagine what kind of information and transparency they’ll be looking for in 10, 15 years’ time.  

The key to sustainability is getting the rest of the industry involved – which is why we’ve launched the report ‘Fashion Futures’ with Forum for the Future, calling for collaboration across the industry. Take cotton as an example. Levi’s uses a lot of cotton, but [it still only accounts for barely]  1% of the total grown. Moreover, we don’t actually buy the cotton ourselves. Our contract manufacturers buy the fabric from the mill, and the mill buys it from the gin [where the fibres are separated from the seeds], and the gin from the growers. So we’re about three steps removed in that process. The only way that we’re going to influence that long supply chain is to get others in the industry to send the signal upstream – to say to the farmer, “Yes, we want cotton grown in a different way”. We need everybody that buys cotton to be saying that, alongside leaders like Marks and Spencers, Ikea and Gap.

For us to survive, Levi’s has had to be classic – but it’s also had to evolve. ‘Fashion Futures’ looks at everything that could influence the future of the industry, with scenarios to tell us how it could respond to resource shortages, localisation, high energy prices, and so on. Our senior executives are using these scenarios to make sure our business strategy takes all the possibilities into account. And we’re also sending them out to our designers, because it’s this kind of innovation – clothes that generate energy, or biodegradable clothing – that we’d like to encourage.

Our vision is to build sustainability into everything we do – so that our profitable growth actually helps to restore the environment. An example? For all the 100 plus laundries that wash our jeans before they are sold, we have water quality standards at an international level. This means that the laundries have to build a water treatment facility. So, in developing countries where we work, like Bangladesh and China, the water we put back into the river is cleaner than the water we take out. Likewise, if we can work with farmers to reduce their chemical and pesticide use, and improve their profitability, that would be a great thing.

The two areas that stand out for us as future challenges are the way cotton is grown and the way our consumers behave. Take the overall environmental impact of any one of our garments. If you look at the water embedded in a pair of jeans – that’s 3,480 litres in the full lifecycle – growing the cotton accounts for 49%, and consumer care (ie washing) for a further 45%. On energy, the breakdown is 30% in cotton, and 60% in consumer care. We’re working with M&S, Ikea, WWF and others, including a number of farmer organisations, on the Better Cotton Initiative (BCI), which trains farmers to use fewer chemicals and less water, makes sure they’re achieving certain labour standards, and that their businesses are economically viable. We’re planting the first crop of what we hope is going to be BCI certified cotton this spring, to be harvested in the autumn – and then we’ll be able to get it into our fabrics.

Closing the loop One of our recent initiatives is ‘A Care Tag for Our Planet’ in the US, which tells consumers to wash their jeans in cold water, tumble dry at low temperatures, and when no longer needed give away for reuse or resale by a charity. We really want to go cradle to cradle, which means ‘repurposing’ (using recycled material in new jeans) as well as recycling at the end of their life. We’re on the way with our ecoline which uses up to 20% recycled denim. It can’t be more than that at the moment because of quality considerations – but we hope to go further towards closing the loop in future. Resources are finite: we can’t keep using cotton in the way we have done.

What’s in it for us? Well, we’ve been around for 150 years, and we want to be around for another 150. We can’t just think about the sustainability of our products. What we need is a more sustainable world: it’s all part of our survival. We’re not going to be able to survive, as a business, using cotton the way it’s currently grown, for example – or with consumers currently washing the products the way they do. And we have to work with industry to change all of that.

Michael Kobori, Vice-President of Social and Environmental Sustainability at Levi Strauss & Co., was in conversation with Anna Simpson.

24 February 2010

Anna Simpson