New Levi's care tag gives tips to lower jeans'iImpact

Levi Strauss & Co. and Goodwill have teamed up on a new initiative to lower the lifecycle impacts of jeans by giving consumers advice on how to care for them and what to do with them when they are no longer wanted.

The initiative, A Care Tag for Our Planet, includes online and in-store messaging, and, starting in January 2010, a new care tag on jeans that encourages consumers to wash clothes less frequently, wash using cold water, line dry items when possible and, when items are no longer wanted, to donate the items to Goodwill.

Levi Strauss & Co. – which was an early adopter of setting supplier requirements related to the environment, creating water quality guidelines and restricting substances from use in clothes – performed a lifecycle impact study of a pair of 501 jeans and found that the greatest opportunity for lowering impacts lies on the consumer side, after the jeans have been purchased.

By washing less, washing in cold water and line drying jeans, consumers can reduce the lifecycle climate change impacts from their jeans by more than 50 percent.

The new tags roll out on jeans in Levi’s retail and wholesale operations in January, and regional and global tags will be added in the fall.