Recycling & Consumer Care

We’re focused on building sustainability into everything we do. To this end, Levi Strauss & Co. commissioned a scientific life cycle assessment of a pair of Levi’s® 501® jeans and Dockers® Original Khakis. 

Our life cycle assessment helped us find out the facts about the climate change, water use and energy impact of each of these products.

To our surprise we learned that 58% of the energy and 45% of the water used during the lifetime of a pair of Levi’s ® jeans occurs during the consumer use phase. This is huge and we know it. So we’ve initiated a global dialogue with consumers – Care for Our Planet – about how caring for their clothes affects the environment. Through this initiative we:

• Are sewing new garment care tags in our clothing that encourage consumers to wash less, wash in cold water, line dry when possible, and donate clothing to charity when no longer needed.
• Launched a contest – Care to Air – to find a better way to air dry jeans, as well as every other article of clothing that typically ends up in the dryer.
• Established a partnership with Goodwill® in the United States to encourage consumers to increase the life cycle of a pair of jeans by donating them instead of contributing to the 23.8 billion pounds of clothing that end up in landfills each year.

Extending the Life of a Pair of Jeans…

Yet, we do realize that someday, even your favorite pair of Levi’s® jeans or Dockers® khakis will reach the end of its useful life in your closet. If its condition is beyond donation, then what? The average person in the U.S. throws away 68 pounds of clothing and textiles a year. We’ve got to do better.

To begin to address this issue, we’re piloting projects in which we reuse old jeans as building insulation and other materials. For instance, we installed recycled denim insulation from Bonded Logic, Inc. in our newly renovated headquarters in San Francisco. Learn more about our renovation and the benefits of denim insulation here.