Recycled Jeans

Recycling jeans can win you a world record—who knew?

Last year, like the readers of National Geographic Kids Magazine, we donated all our denim returns to Cotton Inc.‘s denim recycling program, Cotton: From Blue to Green. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Cotton Inc.‘s denim recycling program, all their denim donations are recycled into cotton insulation which is then given to Habitat for Humanity. How’s that for making you feel a little less guilty for parting ways with your old jeans? 

Although we didn’t come too close to the over 30,000 jeans that these record-holders just donated (see article at CNN here), we are still pretty proud about our contribution.

image from cnn.com

Since we’ve always secretly wanted a world record of our own, we’ve decided to hoard our denim returns for the next few years.

So look out National Geographic Kids. You’ve got some pretty serious competition to look out for.

And don’t think we’ll take it easy on you just because you’re ten. All is fair in love and war.

posted by: abigail on August 13, 2009 at 8:40 am
filed under: Misc Musings | comments (1)
TAGS: recycled jeans

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Where can you find the world’s largest pair of custom jeans?

If you ask Croatia, they’ll direct you to their capital city of Zagreb, where the organizers of the Cockta Jeans Fabric Project have stitched together 8,023 pairs of donated jeans to create one giant custom jean with a 148 foot rise. That’s right - this pair of jeans is spread about 112 feet wide and is the size of about six tennis courts.

Source: Yahoo! News

Why, you ask? Don’t worry, it was for a good cause! The project donated over $10,000 (seven kunas - or $1.30 - per donated pair of jeans) to a local charity which provides therapy to disabled people.

So, now that we know what the people in Croatia do with their old jeans (or just when they’re bored), we’re curious, what do you do with yours?

posted by: rupa on June 17, 2009 at 1:11 pm
filed under: Denim 101 | Add a comment
TAGS: custom jeans, recycled jeans

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We don’t mean green jeans like the color of Kermit the frog.  By green jeans, we mean reduced, reused, or recycled denim. Yeah, like… paper, plastic, denim, aluminum…  Wait, what?  Bingo.  Recycled denim.

No matter how organic the cotton on your new jeans, no matter how environmentally friendly the denim company office practices, no matter the lengths a plant goes to in order to produce a green jean, the energy needed to create a new jean is still much more than the energy you’d be saving by finding a new, household use for an old pair that would otherwise be thrown in your wardrobe waste bin.

To us, being green when it comes to jeans doesn’t necessarily require purchasing anything at all.  You don’t even have to pay fifty cents for that pair of cutoffs at the Salvation Army reserved solely for your desperate housewives car wash drive or splurge on EBAY for those vintage jeans that just turn up on the side of a mountain in, oh, I don’t know, Reno somewhere.  No.  We’re talking about recycling your old jeans to help create a brighter future for denim!  Literally.

Ever wonder where we send returns?  Last year, indi diligently amassed a collection of denim scraps, returns, and sample swatches to donate to Cotton Inc’s COTTON. From Blue To Green.

The result was 150,000 of insulation helping Habitat for Humanity Volunteers build 12 new homes in

“the largest-scale, highest-profile, and biggest-budget rebuilding project to have gotten underway in New Orleans post-Katrina”.

Besides sending your old indi jeans back to us to recycle, there are tons of other ways to turn your old blue jeans green.  Here are just a few ideas we’ve come up with:
1.  Hand em’ down.  If you have a younger sister, or a boyfriend who wears tight jeans, you know what I’m talking about…
2.  Make a quilt
3.  Become this guy

We know that it’s not easy being green, but luckily for us, green is the new blue, baby, and we’re all for it!

posted by: Amy D on March 3, 2009 at 7:18 pm
filed under: Happenings at indiDenim | comments (7)
TAGS: recycled jeans

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