ColumnLevi’s, the iconic jeans and casual wear line, made its name as the working man’s clothing back at the turn of the 20^th century. Valued by cowboys, ranchers, and lumberjacks, Levi’s eventually became an international brand that changed the face of fashion. Now, Levi Strauss is also attempting to change the face of sustainable fashion with its new Dockers Wellthread line. But is it truly sustainable? Or is it eco “jeanwashing”?

The Good

Levi’s is no stranger to sustainability efforts. The brand partnered with Target and Nike in the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, an “industry-wide group of more than 100 leading apparel and footwear brands, retailers, suppliers, nonprofits, and NGOs working to reduce the environmental and social impacts of apparel and footwear products around the world,” according to the group’s website.

Levi’s launched its Water<Less jeans line in 2010. While the average pair of jeans uses “42 litres of water in the finishing process,” according to Levi’s, the Water<Less collection “reduces the water consumption by an average of 28% and up to 96% for some new products in the line.” When a brand like Levi’s makes a commitment to reduce its water use, that’s a pretty big deal, not just in the resources saved, but also in influencing other brands to make similar commitments.

Workers rights are also a core issue for Levi’s. According to the company, they were “the first multinational apparel company to establish a comprehensive workplace code of conduct for our manufacturing suppliers.” Through its Terms of Engagement,  Levi’s has requirements “by which all of our contract factories and licensees must abide — including ethical standards, legal requirements, environmental requirements and community involvement.” There are also employment standards “that address issues of “child labor, forced labor, disciplinary practices, working hours, wages and benefits, freedom of association, discrimination, and health and safety.” In April 2012, Levi’s built onto these standards to further improve the lives of workers in factories around the world.

The company also joined the Better Cotton Initiative, according to the New York Times, “which focuses on sustainable-agriculture techniques, water use and economic and labor issues.” The initiative’s cotton farms in India and Pakistan “have reduced chemical use and water consumption by a third.”

Now, the company has relaunched its bemused brand of Dockers, citing that the Wellthread brand represents “the first time a company has fused sustainable design, environmental conservation and worker wellbeing into product development.” The brand seems clearly committed to redefining its production model…again.

The Bad

It may be easy for small-scale manufacturers to purchase organic materials and control production, but Levi’s is on another level, selling more than $4 billion worth of apparel annually and clothing production is one of the most resource intensive industries. According to Beth Greer, bestselling author, environmental health advocate, and healthy home specialist, “Most of the clothes we wear (unless they are labeled “Fair Trade” or “Organic”) contain some pretty toxic additives. For example, conventionally grown cotton uses more insecticides than any other single crop.” According to Treehugger, one clothing mill in China can use 200 tons of water for one ton of fabric dyed. And notes Greer, there are other issues that impact the clothing industry, “Poor working conditions, minimal environmental regulations, and child and slave labor are commonplace in the $1 trillion garment industry.”

And despite Levi’s efforts like Water<Less and Wellthread, the reality is those products only make up a small percentage of the brand’s offerings. Prior to releasing its Water<Less brand in 2010, Levi’s quietly launched–and then pulled–its Levi’s Eco jeans made with organic cotton. Most of what it sells is made up of pesticide-heavy cotton, with less attention to detail, furthering the “fast fashion” crisis.

While water conservation, like in the Water<Less effort is significant, reducing the amount of pesticides used on cotton is equally–if not more–important for a producer like Levi’s. And although the brand is clearly making efforts to up the quality of its higher priced items with the sustainability slant, consumers complain that core items, like the 501s and 511s have dropped in quality in recent years, with wearing coming early, and zippers malfunctioning.

The Questionable

Failed efforts to move organic cotton into the mainstream, Levi’s earns some kudos for not giving up the sustainability efforts. But is that the case with Dockers Wellthread?

Citing that Dockers Wellthread represents “the first time a company has fused sustainable design, environmental conservation and worker wellbeing into product development,” the brand is committed to redefining its production model.

How does the company achieve this? Levi’s claims it’s a combination of responsible dyes like cold-water pigment dyes for tops and salt-free reactive dyes for pants and jackets. After horrific tragedies in Bangladesh clothing factories earlier this year, the company says it’s also committed to improving the wellbeing of its workers. “I saw all these different nodes of activity in the company that were tackling different problems,” Paul Dillinger , senior director of global design for Dockers, told the Guardian. “The opportunity, to me, was to string all of these ideas together and create a systems approach to change.”

Dockers Wellthread “is built on the premise that once you become informed of the challenges of environmental responsibility and social value, you have to act to create change,” Dillinger told Women’s Wear Daily. “We see where we can adjust our social processes and also yield some great men’s wear.”

Dockers Wellthread are not your mid-nineties Dockers. The new iteration offers another incentive towards a truly sustainable fashion industry. At $140 to $250 a pair, the slacks are the antithesis of fast fashion. Encouraging a high price investment in a pair of slacks can help consumers realign their values around clothing and move towards a healthier relationship with their apparel and their preferred apparel manufacturers.

But still missing from the product is organic cotton–the one ingredient that could bring a significant uptick to Levi’s sustainability commitment. Will we ever see organic cotton replace the pesticide-laden fabric most of us are bundled up in daily? If Levi’s can’t do it successfully, who can?

Keep in touch with Jill on Twitter @jillettinger

Related on EcoSalon

Levi’s Makes Wearing Garbage Fashionable with ‘Plastic’ Jeans

Fiber Watch: An Ancient Textile Is Making Its Way Back

The Dawn of the Not So Clueless Fashion Consumer

Image: Levi’s

The post Levi’s Dockers Are Back in (Sustainable) Fashion or is it Eco ‘Jeanwashing’?: Behind the Label appeared first on EcoSalon.

Green jean, baby.

In 1873, Levi Strauss & Company invented the first blue jeans, a durable pair of trousers that could hold up to the task of constructing America. The rest is history. Today, Levi’s 501 jeans are the world’s best-selling item of clothing, and the blue jean, whether skinny or bell-bottomed, has been a global fashion staple for as long as most of us can remember.

Levi’s commitment to social responsibility has similar historical clout. During the Great Depression, for instance, Levi’s instituted shorter work weeks to prevent the massive lay-offs that were happening around the country. Levi Strauss factories were racially integrated long before the Civil Rights Act mandated it. And in the 1980s, Levi’s became the first American corporation to publicly address the HIV/AIDS epidemic sweeping the nation. The fight against HIV/AIDS continues to be an issue central to the company’s not-for-profit Levi Strauss Foundation.

In addition to its social responsibility efforts, Levi’s has also been a pioneer in the world of sustainability. Their current eco-efforts are founded on an intensive study of the entire product lifecycle of their best-sellers – the Levi’s 501 jeans and Dockers Original Khakis – conducted in 2007. From this study came the idea to further evaluate – or “E-valuate”, as they call it – 11 of their most popular items using primary data across several categories: contribution to climate change, energy use, renewable energy use, water consumption, land occupation, qualified sustainably grown fiber content, waste generation, materials efficiency, recycled content, land transformation, eutrophication, and restricted substance list adherence.

The Good

From the product lifecycle analysis, Levi’s had a better idea of their strengths and weaknesses as a company. They made the decision to hone in on two key phases – cotton production and consumer use – and they have aimed to reduce their impact in the energy, water, chemicals, and materials aspects of apparel manufacturing.

By making the decision to focus, Levi’s has taken a “do less, but better” approach to sustainability marketing. Over the past five years, they’ve made particularly significant strides in the area of water preservation. In 2010, they introduced the Water<Less jean collection, which used up an average of 28% and up to 96% less water in the finishing process than traditional jeans.

“What’s different about the Water<Less collection is that we’re still using the same materials and techniques to create finishes for our jeans but we’ve substantially reduced water’s role in the equation,” said Carl Chiara, Director of Brand Concepts and Special Projects. “Sometimes, the way to achieve a more sustainable design is to rethink a traditional process and find a way to do it better.”

A typical pair of jeans consumes 919 gallons of water throughout its lifecycle, including what’s needed to irrigate the cotton crop, produce the pant, and wash them at home. For Water<Less jeans, Levi’s made simple changes like reducing the number of washing machine cycles by combining multiple wet cycle processes into a single wet process, incorporating ozone processing into the garment washing, and removing the water from the stone wash.

Levi’s also aims to change how customers use their products, after finding that nearly 60 percent of energy use involved in a product’s lifecycle happens after the jeans are taken home. Their “Care Tag for Our Planet” campaign instructs Levi’s owners to wash less often, use cold water in the cycle, air-dry jeans on a line, and donate old jeans to Goodwill, using innovative methods like a crowdsourced design competition for air-dry solutions.

The Bad

Apart from some backlash over a handful of tasteless ads, Levi’s reputation has been pretty pristine for the past few decades. That’s not to say their conscience is completely clean. In the 1990s, Levi’s was embroiled in a scandal involving factories in the Northern Mariana Islands, a commonwealth territory of the United States located in the Pacific Ocean. Though jeans from these factories were branded “Made in the USA,” they were produced primarily by imported laborers operating under “slavelike” conditions: 12-hour work days, seven-day work weeks, poor living conditions, payment well under the minimum wage, and an atmosphere of fear and control.

The high-profile case spurred Levi’s to establish a workplace code of conduct for its manufacturing suppliers. In 1991, the company released the first version of their Terms of Engagement, which spells out the ethical standards, legal requirements, environmental requirements, and community involvement that all of their suppliers and contractors must agree to and abide by.

The Questionable

Levi’s has a strong track record of operating responsibly, and is considered a pioneer in sustainability by many in the industry. The company has compiled an impressive body of information, literature, and resources surrounding its operations, and has been transparent both with its failings as well as its dedication to improve.

However, much of this information isn’t necessarily translated to Levi’s customers. The other day, I popped into a Levi’s retail store in lower Manhattan, expecting significant promotion around the Water<Less campaign, or the Better Cotton Initiative jeans shipped out just a few months ago. Within the store, I couldn’t find any information concerning sustainability, and when I asked a salesperson for information about their sustainable jeans, she said she had no idea what I was talking about. When I mentioned water, she said that most of the denim in the store was made using 96% less water than usual – a pretty big exaggeration of the truth, which is that the Water<Less process uses on average 28% and up to 96% less water than usual.

It was only when leaving the store that I finally stumbled upon a mention of Levi’s sustainable initiatives: a wooden “Care Tag for the Planet” sandwich board placed just outside the front entrance. Funny enough, the actual care instructions faced the wall, while an advertisement for a 30% off sale had prime real estate.

Levi’s is one of the few major apparel brands making waves in the world of sustainable manufacturing. That’s a major accomplishment, but it also comes with a major responsibility. Levi’s is missing the opportunity to educate a wider audience about the importance of sustainability by leaving its efforts out of its mainstream marketing.

A November New York Times article described a recent scene at Levi Strauss HQ:

After being briefed on the cotton initiative by the sustainability team, the new Chief Marketing Officer, Rebecca Van Dyck nodded her approval, then asked, “But do our customers know?”

They won’t if you don’t tell them.

SEE ALSO:

Behind the Label: H&M’s Conscious Collection

Behind the Label: McDonald’s See What We’re Made Of Campaign

The post Behind the Label: Levi Strauss’ E-Valuate Program appeared first on EcoSalon.