Levi’s New idea Waste Not, Want Not
Monday, July 26th, 2010The implications for our Levi’s jeans supplier in Torreon are significant, especially on the laundry side.
Torreon is located in the high northern desert. And as you might expect in a desert, there’s not an abundance of water.
But … in the desert … there are other challenges.
The local government didn’t have water to spare. So the laundry didn’t have many options. Among them,Levis, using municipal sewage water.
Yes, they can treat the sewage to be clean enough to wash levi’s jeans —- and they then recycle that water to reuse it! This is the first time I’ve seen such an extreme and innovative form of water conservation.
This sustainability thinking extends to the finishing factory.
Workers on the factory floor were ironing levi’s jeans prior to packing them up for shipment. Remember, it’s almost 100 degrees outside. And they’re inside levi’s factory building … ironing.
But as I walked through the levi’s factory, it was noticeably cool. Air conditioning? To cool a large warehouse like this one would not only be costly, it would consume an enormous amount of energy.
In this case, the cool air wasn’t coming from air conditioning,Levis shop, but from an old-fashioned “swamp cooler” system,Levis jeans, which cools the building for a fraction of the cost and energy of air conditioning.
With supplier partners like what I saw at levi’s , I left Torreon feeling very optimistic about our efforts at levi’s to enhance sustainability – not only in our supply chain, but also in our products.
It was truly an inspiring visit at levi’s .