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The most sustainable pair of jeans yet

Global Change Award winner Unspun just launched the Genesis jeans, breaking new ground on how to make our favourite garment more sustainable. Producing a single pair of jeans today requires an immense amount of water and energy, and produces a significant amount of pollution. Designed for circularity and disassembly in accordance with the Ellen MacArthur Jeans redesign program, the Genesis jeans solve for these challenges by combining disruptive innovations such as Resortecs and Eon – also previous Global Change Award winners.

To make a difference in the fashion industry and essentially to the planet, denim jeans – just like any other garment – need to be recycled. However, jeans are often made of blended materials, and has zippers, studs and threads that makes the process much more difficult and time consuming.

Global Change Award winner Unspun is determined to change this old truth. They are applying tech to ensure that their jeans are not only made to order, but made to measure and recycle. With their newest collection – Genesis jeans, Unspun is using leading-edge materials and emerging technology to create garments that not only reduce water, energy pollution and waste, but also enable tracking and identification to enable their garments to circulate around the circular supply chain in a continuous lifecycle.

“This is an exciting step forward towards circular design for fashion.”

Laura Balmond, Make Fashion Circular Programme Manager at Ellen MacArthur Foundation

The Genesis jeans are developed as part of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s Jeans Redesign program. “Unspun’s innovative solutions to meet the Jeans Redesign Guidelines to ensure that jeans are durable, recyclable, contain safe inputs and can be easily traceable, demonstrates the power of collaboration across the fashion industry. This is an exciting step forward towards circular design for fashion,” says Laura Balmond, Make Fashion Circular Programme Manager at Ellen MacArthur Foundation.

Genesis jeans

  • Unspun’s inventory-free systems of production creating customized jeans on demand
  • Material: 99% GOTS certified organic Cotton, 1% Lycra
  • Thread – Resortecs smart stitch thread which can be heated and dissolved to make recycling feasible
  • Button – made from non-electroplated raw zinc alloy, removable for easy recycling or reuse
  • Zipper – made from non-electroplated brass, zip tape is made from post-consumer recycled polyester
  • Enable resale and recycling – a scannable QR code, powered by Eon’s Internet of Things platform, integrated into each pair of Genesis jeans makes it possible to track the origins and record the life of the garment, ensuring the product and its materials can be identified and authenticated for resale and recycling from one life cycle to the next.

“By digitizing every pair of Genesis jeans using Eon’s Internet of Things technology to connect each garment to customers, resellers and recyclers, unspun is moving circular denim from a theory and a concept to a fully enabled system.”

Natasha Franck, Eon founder and CEO