AsAna Colon at Glamour USreports, Wrangler have just launched a range calledIndigoodwith these impressive stats: 100 per cent water reduction, 30 per cent recycled cotton, 100 per cent eco-tech finishing.
We love, love, love to see legacy fashion brands addressing the almighty impact clothes-making can have on the environment. We’re delighted, then, to hear today that the legendary American jeans company Wrangler are making moves to produce their denim products in a more sustainable way.
Ana visited some of Wrangler’s factories in Valencia, Spain, where she learned about their newest sustainable initiative. While she was there, Wrangler’s senior director of sustainability, Roian Atwood, told her that the company have decided to target the process of indigo dyeing – “because it has the most significant visual and ecological impact on the planet. ”
The process of dyeing jeans their signature shade of blue requires gallons of water, you see. Wrangler wanted to find a way of doing that dyeing without having quite such a monumental environmental impact. “If we can create a technology that has no waste water and that minimises the water consumption, we’ve solved for a really big industry issue,” Roain said. Indigood is the first range to use foam-dyeing technology to solve this exact problem. According to Wrangler, this process uses 60 per cent less energy and 90 per cent fewer chemicals than the usual dyeing method. It also creates zero waste.
Basically, what happens is an indigo foam solution is applied dry to cotton yarn, which dyes it that classic denim blue. The yarn is then put in nitrogen to prevent oxygenation, meaning the jeans don’t need to be soaked multiple times or rinsed through chemicals, which both contribute to the whopping amount of water the traditional dyeing process requires.
The Indigood technique will be used first in Wrangler’s Icons range, which is a three-piece denim capsule that came out in spring 2019.
We are seriously impressed. Hopefully, we’ll see more fashion companies starting to think this way – and soon.
