REPAIR. REIMAGINE. RECYCLE.
A garment’s footprint doesn’t stop once it’s made and purchased. In fact, how you treat and dispose of your jeans accounts for 23% of the total water used and up to 40% of the climate impact of its lifecycle.
So, here’s the bad news: Over half of all garments made are burned or buried within the span of just one year, with around 20 billion garments of clothes ending up in a landfill each year. This has to change.
Luckily, we have good news too: There’s a lot you can do to reduce the impact of your clothes and we’ve made it a priority to educate shoppers on care and recycling. By wearing your clothes for an extra nine months, you can reduce their carbon, waste and water footprint up to 30%.
Practices like washing your jeans less often and getting them repaired, reinforced or altogether reworked give new life to old clothes. Our Tailor Tutorials series is a good place to start. If you’d rather leave it to the experts (a.k.a. us), the Levi’s® Tailor Shop has you covered.
Not all clothes are meant to be family heirlooms passed down for generations—and that’s okay. When your time with a garment is up, recycling programs (like Levi’s® SecondHand!) can significantly extend the lifetime of your garments.
All clothes come at a cost. So the next time you shop, ask yourself if the cost is worth it: Do you see yourself wearing this garment year after year? Do you actually like that piece, or are you only getting it because this style is “in” right now?
While improvements within LS&Co. are all well and good, they’re not enough—we need everyone, shoppers and brands alike, to do their part to affect industry-wide structural change. We’ve come a long way, and together we can go so much further.
Facts and figures from:
“These facts show how unsustainable the fashion industry is” by the World Economic Forum
“A New Textiles Economy: Redesigning fashion’s future” by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation
“How Much Do Our Wardrobes Cost to the Environment?” by the World Bank
“There is a Textile Waste Crisis” by ThredUp
“The LIfe Cycle of a Jean” and “Use & Reuse” by Levi Strauss & Co.