Have an old pair of Levi’s jeans lying around? It could fetch you up to $25 if you bring it back to one of the brand’s US stores.
In an attempt to embrace the circular economy, Levi has launched a new program in which the company buys old Levi’s jeans, cleans them, and sells them in a new online store called Levi’s SecondHand.
As reported by Adele Peters of Fast Company, Levi Strauss will be the first to focus on taking back and reselling jeans. From a sustainability perspective, reuse is a better option as it means the environmental impact of making a new pair of jeans—from water and fertilizer used to grow cotton to the dyes that are used—can be avoided.
Plus, Levi’s new program puts value on something that would have likely wound up in the landfill; each year, consumers collectively throw out $460 billion worth of clothing. This is not only an economic disaster but also an environmental one.
According to Levi’s, the carbon footprint of a pair of cleaned and repaired jeans is 80% lower than new jeans. In fact, just extending the life of a piece of clothing by nine months does more to reduce environmental impact than anything else that can happen in the life cycle of that apparel.
