Tag: jeans

OM in the News: Levi’s New Laser-Wielding Robot That Makes Ethical Jeans

You know those jeans that your students love, the ripped ones that look like they’re 30 years old? (Even though they just bought them.) You probably don’t realize it, but a team of designers took weeks to figure out exactly where to fade the indigo and position the tears for the most authentic vintage look, reports Fast Company (Feb. 28, 2018). Then, factory workers used sandpaper and harsh chemicals to make it look properly worn in. The jeans washed for hours, so that the blue color would fade out–even though those dyes end up polluting the groundwater.

At Levi’s, a brand that talks about trying to be as sustainable and humane to workers as possible, the ugly reality of what it takes to make jeans—especially when you are selling $4.6 billion worth of them a year—isn’t something that is brushed under the table. “Our company offers over 1,000 different finish looks per season, which is mind boggling,” says a Levi exec. “They’re all produced with very labor-intensive, repetitive motion jobs, and a long list of chemical formulations.”

But the firm has just introduced a brand new laser technology that will, in a snap, do what now takes much longer. The breakthrough uses infrared light to etch off a very fine layer of the indigo and cotton from a pair of jeans, creating the same kind of faded finishes and tears in 90 seconds flat. “It started as an idea for a change in a manufacturing process,” says Levi’s supply chain officer. “But it has actually evolved into a holistic digital transformation that covers the whole supply chain from end to end.” Using the laser-wielding robots in Levi’s factories has the potential to eliminate many repetitive, dangerous tasks that are an everyday part of the job for denim workers– and help cut down on the 13,500 workforce. The new laser tech saves time, effort, and the Earth.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. Are your students aware of how faded jeans impact the Earth?
  2. Why is this a supply chain issue?

 

OM in the News: Levi’s Turns Recycled Plastic into Jeans

Most apparel companies work hard to give their clothes the sheen of sophistication or whimsy. Levi Strauss is trying hard not to. The upcoming pitch in stores: “These jeans are made of garbage.” Crushed brown and green plastic bottles will be on display nearby. Eight of those are blended into each pair of Levi’s new Waste‹Less jeans, which are composed of at least 20% recycled plastic, reports Businessweek (Oct. 22-28, 2012).

The Waste‹Less collection is part of a bigger push to reduce Levi’s environmental impact throughout the entire process of making jeans. “We want to build sustainability into everything we do,” says the VP- environmental sustainability. Resource scarcity and increasingly volatile prices for cotton make this a necessity more than a choice.

In 2007, Levi’s was among the first in the apparel industry to conduct a life-cycle assessment. It found that 49% of the water use during the lifetime of a pair of jeans occurred at the very beginning, with cotton farmers. (Another 45% of the water was used by consumers to wash their jeans, typically about 100 times.) So Levi’s began to teach farmers how to grow cotton with less water. In 2010, it also began a marketing campaign to encourage people to wash their jeans less often, in cold water only, and line-dry them. This year, Levi’s will ship 29 million Water‹Less jeans, saving 360 million liters of water.

After the Water‹Less project got underway, Levi’s began thinking about plastic and began testing fibers from recycled colored plastic bottles. When plastic bottles are recycled, they’re sorted by color, cleaned, and sold as polyester flakes. Those flakes can be stretched, or extruded, into fiber, which can be spun into yarn and woven into cotton fabric on high-speed machines. The first batch of Waste‹Less jeans used about 3.5 million bottles all together. “Is turning 8 bottles of plastic into a pair of jeans worth it? I think so,” says the CEO.

Discussion questions:

1. Why is sustainability an important OM issue?

2. What other clothing firms in active in environmental sustainability? What does each do?

    •