Re-Use

Our lifecycle assessment revealed 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. We also learned that how our consumers care for their clothes can greatly reduce the climate change impact of our products:

• Consumers can decrease the climate change impact of their Levi’s® by about 32% if they wash their jeans once every two weeks. They can further decrease the environmental impact by 48% by washing their jeans once a month.
• They can also make a difference if they wash their clothes in cold water.

This is huge and we know it. So we’ve initiated a global dialogue with consumers about how to care for their clothing.

We recently launched A Care Tag for our Planet

• to educate consumers about how caring for their clothes affects the environment. The new garment care tags encourage consumers to “Machine wash cold; line dry when possible; donate to Goodwill.”
• We’ve partnered with Goodwill in an effort to encourage consumers to increase the lifecycle of a pair of jeans by donating them instead of contributing to the 23.8 billion pounds of clothing that end up in land fills each year.
• We’ve partnered with the Alliance to Save Energy and Procter & Gamble, makers of Tide Coldwater, to encourage consumers to save energy and money by washing their jeans in cold water.

And we are following our own advice. In 2008, for example, we donated more than 200,000 pairs of recycled jeans to insulate the newly reopened California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, helping the building earn the highest possible environmental rating.