A Fight through Fashion: Levi’s Proposes Sustainable Practices

Dec 12

Dec 12 A Fight through Fashion: Levi’s Proposes Sustainable Practices

Imagine having a cabinet overflowing with clothes you’ve either grown out of or are too worn out to wear. You want to eliminate this excess without directly tossing them away and consequently contributing to the accumulation of landfill waste and greenhouse gas. Hand-me-downs, secondhand market donations, and DIY crafting make solid options, and the latter is also a portal to creativity. However, all these options are contingent on the clothes meeting a certain quality threshold in order for them to be re-worn or recreated. Ever thought about sending your raggedy old T-shirts to facilities where they can be separated and manufactured back into new T-shirts? Levi’s sustainable practices in clothes production allows you to fulfill that.

Conservation of fabric is indeed an essential but relatively overlooked aspect of sustainability, compared to more ubiquitous methods like heat and gasoline conservation. In fact, almost 10,000 gallons of water in total are typically used to synthesize a pair of regular blue jeans, with around 1,800 gallons used to grow enough cotton for the making process and an additional whopping 8,182 gallons used for dyeing. Each year, Americans toss away an average of 80 pounds of clothing, which amounts to 14 billion tons of clothing across the national population, constituting about 8 percent of landfill waste.

To combat this trend, Levi’s Wellthread line launched a capsule collection, which practices a design method that uses just one type of material to make one item of clothing. T-shirts are made solely from cotton, with a quarter of it having been recycled from jeans and clothing scraps. Furthermore, if you’re tight on budget, consider vouching for Levi’s trucker hemp denim jacket, which contains polyester fleece lining on the interior that is feasibly detachable. This renders the jacket suitable for both warmer and colder seasons, as you can alternate between a heavier winter garment and a lighter spring coat with just this one item.

However, Levi’s is not the only company pushing for sustainability measures. Other startups include the Everlane Sustainability Committee, which strives to eradicate virgin plastic, a newly manufactured rather than recycle plastic that degrades throughout its reprocessing. Another noteworthy company is Allbirds, which designs sneakers made from wool, tree fiber, and other sustainable fibers.

As a far-reaching brand that generates about $5.6 billion in yearly revenue, Levi’s would undoubtedly lay a significant impact on the fashion recycling industry, diverting millions of thrown out clothes from the landfill into newly generated ones and sending them off to 110 different countries. The hurdle, however, is the lack of national effort towards fabric recycling, in comparison to practices regarding conserving practical resources like paper, water, and aluminum. Evident in the increasing amount of fabric waste being tossed away yearly, fabric recycling has been much lower of a priority and has gone unaware by many Americans. As Paul Dillinger, Levi’s head of innovation, says, “there hasn’t been an urgency around the collection, recovery, and repurposing of arguments.” On the other hand, the United Kingdom government recently proposed a bill taxing clothing items, in order to fund the development of the fabric recycling culture. Dillinger cites this, as well as other fashion sustainability-related policies in various countries, as an open door that induces change by raising awareness about the accumulation of fabric waste.

Indeed, our government should follow suit and formulate policies to encourage fabric recycling and make Americans more conscious about the waste they are creating otherwise. Levi’s proposing sustainability practices is an effective beginning, but it’s not enough: more companies should design clothes that are feasibly separated and recreated. While these changes in society as a whole are tedious to impose, we can begin by changing the way we personally think about clothes, from something that degrades and becomes disposable over time to something that may age but remains nonetheless reusable.

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