Levi’s Wants To Invent The Jeans You’ll Be Wearing In 2050

Every year, the average American throws out 80 pounds of clothing, which amounts to 14 billion tons across the entire population. Some of these clothes are donated or sold on the secondhand market. But ultimately, they all end up in the same place: the trash heap. These days, T-shirts, jeans, prom dresses, and shoes make up about 8% of landfill waste. But imagine if you could throw a your ratty old t-shirt or worn-out jeans into the recycling bin, along with your plastic water bottle and aluminum beer can. The clothes would then get sent to a facility where they would be broken down and turned back into new T-shirts and jeans. Paul Dillinger, Levi’s head of innovation, believes this future is around the corner. And he wants Levi’s to be ready for the day that large-scale clothing recycling becomes available. Levi’s recently launched a capsule collection through its eco-friendlier Wellthread line that is designed to be easily processed by an industrial fabric-recycling plant. “We are building a design practice to retrain designers to design clothes that can be more efficiently taken back, recovered, and turned into next-generation materials,” Dillinger says. Read more at Fast Company.