Levi's And Outerknown Figure Out How To Use Hemp In Denim - Forbes

Industrial hemp is now coming to your jeans. GettyGetty

Levi’s, the maker of the iconic 501 jeans, is getting into the hemp space in the name of sustainability.

In partnership with sustainable fashion brand Outerknown, the two companies’ latest collection features pieces made from a blend of cotton and hemp.  The two brands have collaborated before on sustainable denim, but this is the first time their collection will use the recently legalized crop.

“We partnered with fiber technology specialists to create a ‘cottonization’ process that softens the fiber — using very little energy or chemical processing — to make it look, and more importantly feel, almost indistinguishable from cotton,” reads an announcement from Levi’s.

Industrial hemp is often touted as a sustainable material that can be used to make everything from textiles to buildings to cars. Advocates hail hemp’s host of environmental benefits: It can capture carbon from the air and can also can decontaminate polluted soils. Meanwhile, it also requires a lot less water to grow compared to cotton.

Last December, Congress legalized industrial hemp through the 2018 Farm Bill. The cannabis analytics firm New Frontier predicts that the hemp industry will reach $5.7 billion by 2020.

But just because hemp is legal now doesn’t mean it will be easy to make consumer goods out of it. For one thing, the industrial hemp industry is dealing with regulatory uncertainty. State and local police have seized hemp shipments post-legalization, and the FDA has warned that CBD in foods and dietary supplements are still very much illegal.

Regulations aside, adopting hemp in textiles manufacturing has other challenges to overcome, too. Hemp textiles are durable, but can also be rough and scratchy.

When I spoke to a Kentucky hemp farmer for The Outline last year, he explained that simply legalizing hemp isn’t enough. Mike Lewis cultivates industrial hemp mostly for textiles and grain. But the textiles industry is built on cotton, making it difficult for producers to process hemp for textiles. It took Lewis a whole year to figure out how he could process the hemp locally.

“Simply planting more hemp doesn’t change the infrastructure problems that exist in the production of these consumer products,” he told me at the time.

And that’s why, as Levi’s tells it, their “cottonized hemp is huge… for the entire industry.”

https://ift.tt/2CasqkO