In the past couple of years, Levi Strauss, the company that invented the iconic denim jeans, has been quite successful in proving that positive, sustainable change can go hand in hand with profitable business results. Just recently, the clothing brand has started blending hemp with cotton to make its fabric more sustainable. Hemp is known to be far more environmentally friendly than cotton. It doesn’t require as many pesticides and also needs half as much water as cotton to grow. The reason why hemp hasn’t been embraced by clothing manufacturers up until now is because of its coarse feel. To solve the issue, Levi’s has come up with a “cottonizing” technique which employs a process developed by fiber technology specialists that softens the hemp, making it feel just as good, if not better than cotton. The jeans and jacket in this collection are made from 70/30 blend of cotton and hemp, and all the hemp was sourced from a crop that was exclusively rain-fed – which means it required no additional irrigation and thus reduced the water used in cultivation by 30 percent. Such great initiatives show that it’s possible for the fashion industry to take a more sustainable business trajectory without sacrificing earnings.
Levi’s is making use of hemp to create more sustainable apparel
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