Long before circularity became a buzzword, Nudie Jeans focused on longevity and knew that garments you love – you keep. Starting with a pair of dry denim and wearing them every day will produce the most beautiful and personal wear and tear and the jeans will tell the story of the life you spent wearing them.
93,8% of all the fibres used in Nudie Jeans garments is cotton and the brand only works with Organic, Fairtrade or Recycled cotton, as the largest environmental impact of a company’s products is from growing the raw material. The first goal was reached in 2012 when all its denim was made in organic cotton and the journey has continued since. In 2017, it reached the same goal for the rest of its product groups.
Recycled and Reuse
Using recycled cotton is a great way to decrease environmental impact, as cotton is a resource intensive crop to grow. Nudie Jeans uses recycled cotton in its Rebirth collection, where the denim was made with 20% recycled cotton, originating from its own collected post-consumer Nudie Jeans. The collection also contained T-shirts made with post-consumer recycled cotton from externally collected garments.
To recycle cotton on fibre level is one way to be more sustainable and decrease environmental impact. But reusing the actual fabric is an even better option. The company uses old Nudie Jeans brought in by customers, in different ways. The majority becomes patches used in the repair service, but it also uses the fabric from old Nudie jeans to make new products, such as bucket hats for example. The brand also sells turned in jeans as preloved Re-use jeans in its Repair Shops. In 2019, the company collected 11,573 pairs of old Nudie Jeans in its Repair Shops. This was an increase of about 1,000 pairs compared to 2018.
Rebirth: Made with post-consumer recycled Nudie Jeans
Nudie Jeans works with the notion that ‘throwaway’ and ‘jeans’ are two words that do not belong together. Offering free repairs as well as collecting, repairing and reselling second-hand Nudie Jeans, are initiatives which keep the brand true to its philosophy.
The aim of these initiatives is to keep Nudie Jeans in use for as long as possible. But not all jeans can be brought back to life. For the Rebirth denim the brand had to take a different approach by doing the next best thing through recycling the jeans into new garments.
Recycling post-consumer garments can be trickier than it might sound. One needs to have a functional system for collecting garments and equally as important, have control over the fibre content to ensure a high-quality end product. Fortunately, the Repair and Re-use initiatives have since long built a foundation for collecting unwanted jeans, and since they belong to the brand, the fiber content is known very well. Basically, the idea of repairing and reusing its own products paved the way for recycling them as well.
By mechanical recycling, the collected jeans were cut into pieces, ground to fibres and blended with virgin organic cotton to guarantee durability. After yarn spinning and weaving, Nudie Jeans ended up with a 12.75 oz comfort stretch denim which was indigo dyed and subsequently over-dyed black. The finished dry fabric is pitch black and will fade over time revealing the underlying indigo.
Exploring new sustainable fabrics and fibres is also part of the design process at Nudie Jeans – working closely with fabric suppliers, adapting new developments, and keeping track of new technologies. In 2019 it included more recycled fibres in its collection and thereby decreased environmental impact. A garment or an accessory is defined as sustainable when it contains at least 70% sustainable fibres defined in the company’s material tool.
Nudie Jeans Material Tool
Although organic cotton is the main material the brand works with, it strives to use other sustainable materials for non-denim products. In 2018, it created the Nudie Jeans Material Tool based on Made By’s Environmental Benchmark for Fibres and the Higg Materials Sustainability Index (MSI), with the aim of guiding its designers and product developers to achieve Nudie Jeans goal to work with 100% sustainable materials.
The Nudie Jeans Material Tool has three categories of sustainable fibres, all of which are defined as Sustainable by Nudie Jeans. By sorting them as seen in the Material Tool, the brand wants to highlight the most sustainable and circular fibres, with the aim of pushing development further and challenging the industry to scrutinise the definition and use of sustainable fibres.
To complement the Sustainable categories, there is a Non-Sustainable category for fibres that may be used for Nudie Jeans products, that are not defined as Sustainable, and a Do Not Use category for fibres that should not be used in Nudie Jeans products at all.
Certifications
Working with certified raw materials is enormously important to Nudie Jeans. The organic cotton used for its products is certified in accordance with Global Organic Textile Standards (GOTS), the Organic Content Standard 100 (OCS 100), or the US Department of Agriculture (USDA Organic) depending on the origin and supplier. All cotton sourced in India through Chetna Organic is both Fairtrade and GOTS certified.
With new materials entering Nudie Jeans’ production range, the company is also increasing the range of certifications with which it works. For human-made cellulosic textiles such as Tencel, FSC-certification, as well as PEFC certifications is applicable, while for recycled yarns, it endeavours to use the Global Recycled Standard.
In contrast to organic cotton, conventional cotton accounts for 25% of the global use of artificial pesticides, but covers only 3% of the farm land. To obtain one kilo of conventional cotton requires the same amount of synthetic fertilisers, pesticides and biocides.
Since clean dry denim fabric is one of the cornerstones of Nudie Jeans, why would it use anything but clean cotton to produce it? In fact all its cotton garments originate from certified organic farming.
Organic cotton is grown without any toxic chemicals or genetically modified seeds. It has a low impact on the environment. Organic production leaves the soil useful for other crops to supplement farmer’s food and income. It is beneficial for biodiversity. In contrast, conventional cotton is a chemical intense process. These chemicals have a tremendous negative effect on air, water and soil. As they are among the most toxic substances around, they also have a huge impact on people’s health in cotton-growing areas.
And there are more benefits. No artificial pesticides or fertilisers means no energy consumption to produce those substances. Organic cotton is rain-fed to large parts, meaning less irrigation and less strain on already water-scarce areas. Cotton is a highly water intensive crop, but by supporting small-scale organic cotton producers and methods for more effective irrigation, saving water is possible With all these facts on hand, it is a mystery why less than 1% of all cotton produced worldwide is organic.
From Turkey and India
Nudie Jeans only uses organic cotton.. Around 85% of the organic cotton used for Nudie Jeans products is sourced from Turkey, and its second largest sourcing country for cotton is India. Company officials have visited cotton fields where its cotton grows in both Turkey and India as a part of the traceability work and for own interest in learning more about the raw material.
Of the organic cotton Nudie Jeans uses, the cotton sourced from Chetna Coalition is also Fair Trade. This means it covers both the positive aspects of organic cotton and the Fairtrade system that guarantees fair working conditions and correct payment to the farmers for their cotton.
The packaging matters too
Nudie Jeans finds it equally important to care for how it packages and distribute its products to the customer. All bags and gift boxes used in its Repair Shops are made from recycled paper and are FSC certified. The Forest Stewardship Council offers certification to ensure responsible forest management. Since 2017 the company buys all its paper bags, gift boxes, and plastic bags for its online shop from Avisera’s ÅterBära program. This enables Avisera to invest in tree planting to counterbalance the CO2 emissions from the packaging materials.
In 2019, the company sourced a new polybag supplier to consolidate the production of its polybags and to ensure that all polybags that are used for production are made of 80% recycled plastics.
Source: Nudie Jeans
