Planet Champions: Adam Taubenfligel

How can we build a more responsible denim industry?

How many pairs of jeans do you own? And how often do you think about what they’re made from? Not only does today’s denim typically contain plastic – the industry also has a significant carbon footprint. In fact, according to one academic estimate, each pair of denim jeans contributes 33.4 kilogrammes of CO2 to the atmosphere. Jeans are also extremely water- and land-intensive to produce, and there are other hidden environmental impacts in their production, such as the use of harmful chemicals to give them the trademark aesthetic that has become a cultural staple in countries around the world.

One person who knows all about the impact of denim, and is trying to do something about it, is Adam Taubenfligel, creative director and responsibility lead at responsible fashion brand Triarchy. He sat down with Springwise to talk about how the company is hoping to inspire change in the industry by avoiding plastic, sourcing cotton responsibly, and working with suppliers to implement the latest production technologies.

How is plastic used in the denim industry today?

All stretch jeans that have ever existed to date contain plastic – that’s where the stretch comes from – and plastic is a crude oil product. Basically, we take oil and through various processes turn it into plastic microfibres.

We’ve conditioned the customer to expect stretch in their jeans, and often when I have these conversations, people will say ‘oh, there’s plastic in stretch?’ It’s not even something that really registers, and I think it’s intentional from the manufacturer’s side to not shine a spotlight on it.

What is the impact of fashion-related plastic?

Annually, we’re talking about roughly 70 million barrels of oil that are used to make the world’s polyester fibre, which is now the most commonly used fibre in our clothing – more than cotton or anything else. And plastic microfibres are shed from our clothes throughout their lifetime when we wash them. Last time I checked, 85 per cent of man-made material found along the ocean shores comes from our clothing, and plastic-based clothing takes 200 years to decompose in a landfill. So, the impact is high.

What are the origins of Triarchy?

My brother, sister, and I started the brand, and, as we started scaling, it just became really clear to us that we didn’t want to scale in the way the industry had been doing it to date. When I visited the larger facilities and looked at the impact of the fabrics, I just thought why would any company aspire to this? If this is what success looks like, then this isn’t really something that I want to be a part of. So, we took it offline for over a year, and in that time, we did a really big deep dive into what sustainability means – before it was a buzzword.

From that research, it became very clear to us that we couldn’t work with plastic. I saw so much communication from brands that were talking about their sustainable practices, yet all of those practices were being done on plastic garments. To me, that’s kind of akin to trying to sell someone on toxic-free paint when you’re painting on a wall of asbestos. And it’s like who cares about the paint? Why are we trading under ‘sustainability’ if the core of the product is irresponsible? That doesn’t make sense. So, we eliminated plastic from the brand entirely.

That was a pretty big thing to do as a denim brand that’s specialised in women’s jeans. But when I met with some of our suppliers and kept saying ‘I can’t really look at 90 per cent of your fabrics because we don’t work with plastics,’ it piqued their interest. Then, eventually, our Italian denim mill said ‘what if we come up with an alternative?’ And so, with Candiana, we did end up making the world’s first and only plastic-free stretch denim.

Initially, it wasn’t that awesome. It took some time to get it to feel more like denim, because initially it felt more like a real stretch spandex product. But where we’re at with it now is very refined, and it offers a completely toxic-free alternative to stretch with no microplastics and a two-year biodegradation time at the end of its life. It also has soil fertilisation benefits – it will compost the soil when it decomposes.

What is the stretch in your plastic-free stretch denim made of?

It’s natural rubber that’s harvested sustainably from the rubber tree. We don’t currently have a way of doing recycled rubber. That would be the goal, but it’s a very intense process and we haven’t figured it out yet. There are also really exciting alternatives to rubber, and we’re looking into that right now too.

But, today, the composition of our fabric is 96 or 98 per cent regenerative cotton then 2 or 4 per cent natural rubber, depending on the blend.

Do you use responsible cotton?

We’re a brand that has a really strict lens on responsibility. I said earlier that you can’t really use all these sustainable practices to make a pair of plastic jeans, and the same goes for all the building blocks of the fabric. We’re a very big proponent of organic cotton, but it’s such a murky part of the industry, with certifications that may or may not be accurate. I’ve really come to like regenerative cotton better because I just think it really motivates the farmer to change their practices without putting the pressures and cost of certification onto them. So that really has become a focus for us.

I’ve never worked with traditional cotton just because it’s not responsible, and a brand of our size has the luxury of being able to make those decisions. I think the beauty of Triarchy is that we built our business with these practices as part of our DNA.

What are the challenges associated with the washing process for denim?

Before plastic became such a huge issue for us, we talked about water more than anything else, because denim is such a water-dependent garment. I think, after leather, it’s the worst offender when it comes to unnecessary water use and over-consumption.

So, what we started looking at was the washes. Making a nice, light pair of jeans with that beautiful summer blue takes a lot of work, and that’s not even taking into account how the mill dyes the fabric before it gets to me. Every pair of stretch jeans starts super dark blue in colour, and then you just have to wash it and beat it up as many times as needs be for it to look the way we like it to look. So you’ll put it into a stone wash, which is just stones and water beating up the jeans over and over again, and it’s really hard to recycle that water because of all the stone effluent. Then you’ll probably do a wash with a bleach or an acid to get the colour down even further.

So, you’ve got stone washing, you’ve got bleaching, and you’ve got acid. Then you have rinse processes between all of those and you also spray potassium permanganate, which is a toxic chemical, onto the jeans to distress the fabric and give it the whiskers. It’s really a disgusting process – it’s just chemicals, chemicals, water, chemicals. And then we put the finished jeans on and we’re like ‘oh, this feels like a Sunday morning.’ But it was made in hell.

How do you make washing denim more sustainable?

Thankfully, we’ve started to see companies that are making machinery with the basic intention of mimicking traditional practices – we need to get the same outcome, but we’re going to do it in a completely different way. One of them is called an e-flow, which is a really cool machine that basically takes about a glass of water and turns it into a vapour spray. Then the little nanobubbles have an enzyme on their skin, and when they hit the denim they explode and create little micro-abrasions that mimic stone washing. So, instead of requiring, let’s say, 100 litres of water per pair just in the stone washing process, you’re taking a glass of water and then thousands and thousands of these little bubbles create the abrasions.

Then you have an ozone machine which basically takes O2 and converts it into O3. And the best way to describe what this machine does is that it’s like leaving a pair of jeans on the roof for a month. It simulates weather and distressing, and you can bleach with ozone too. It’s incredible. And then, at the end of the process, it converts the O3 back into O2 and it goes out of the machine and that’s the end of it.

Lastly, you can use lasers in place of potassium permanganate. You basically design the distressing digitally and burn it onto the garment like a printer. With these three technologies alone, we can eliminate chemicals and reduce water use by 80 per cent at least. So, when we take that and put it onto plastic-free stretch, we feel we can use the word ‘responsible’ responsibly.

We often hear that traceability in fashion is key – what does this mean for you and what steps are you taking to keep tabs on your supply chain?

This is a huge one for me, and to start it’s important to say that I don’t think brands should be allowed to speak for themselves when it comes to their responsibility claims, because that is where greenwashing comes from. I don’t always think that’s malicious – I don’t think that people are sitting around a room cackling like Doctor Evil saying ‘lets tell people it’s this when it’s not.’ But what ends up happening is that you meet a fabric supplier who says ‘oh, I have the answer to fabric. It’s this. It’s so amazing.’ Then you say, ‘oh my God, this is so amazing’, and you take it to the designers who design with it, then we make it and send it to stores, saying ‘this is made from the most amazing fabric.’ The store then says ‘wow’ and they put it on the wall of the store, and the customer says wow, this brand is using the world’s most amazing fabric. But, before all that, at the very start of the line, no-one has asked any tough questions. And so really the fabric isn’t awesome, and yet you’ve passed it down along this game of telephone to well-intentioned people who just didn’t really question it because they thought the person before them questioned it. We end up with this messaging on the wall of a store that’s total ******** , yet it’s being sold to people like it’s a sustainable product, when it’s just a disaster.

What happens when you have a third-party auditor is that the entire line of belief gets questioned and audited by them. Then they come back to you and say ‘hey, just so you know, this and this is actually this and this, so the communication needs to be clear, and, going forward, I think we can do better.’ This is what I’ve experienced with our third-party auditor. There’s times when I will put something to them and they’ll say ‘okay, I want to explain to you a couple of things about this that could be done better.’ Then I take those points back to the mill and we improve on them. So, it’s a win-win for everybody.

Everything Triarchy makes has a unique QR code inside of it, which takes the customer to the third-party auditor’s website where they have done the analysis on all of our practices. The customer can then see those results for that unique garment – it’s not brand-specific, it’s literally garment-specific. To me that eliminates the potential for greenwashing entirely.

It also allows us to publish really important information independent of us. Sometimes it’s not perfect, and that’s okay because it’ll take time to get perfect. But this allows us to be honest. If you’re publishing the information yourself, it means nothing sadly.

Your jeans cost several hundred dollars. How do you hope to influence the rest of the market?

I like this question very much because I think it’s important to flag that sustainability is an affluent conversation. It’s not accessible. And the reason our jeans cost what they cost is because when we do all these things that I’ve talked about, we get an invoice from the factory, and it’s always a punch in the stomach. Then they’re like ‘well, if you want to remove the e-flow and the ozone and we do the traditional laundry, we can reduce the cost by $20.’ Twenty bucks is a big reduction. But what are we going to do? Be like okay, dump it in the acid? It’s just not an option. Sadly, like I said, it’s sustainability – it’s an affluent conversation.

Luckily, our partners really understand what we’re trying to do, and to be honest, everyone takes a bit of a hit on the margin to make it happen. As we sell more and the volume grows, obviously the cost will come down, so we’re all in it together.

But without further adoption of these practices, it’s a bit of a bleak prognosis. The factory where we manufacture also manufactures for 7-10 of the world’s biggest denim brand names that you would know and recognise. But I’ll often get some samples back and say ‘hey, is anyone else having this issue where I‘m trying to get this grade of blue and we keep coming up flat.’ Normally, they will say to me ‘I can’t answer that because you’re the only brand that uses these machines.’

So, you’re blazing a trail so that, in the long term, the price will come down for everyone?

Absolutely, yes. I have friends that work in some of these other brands and they’ll tell me that Triarchy comes up in their meetings. So, I know we’re on the radar and that people are looking at these practices and realise that they’re important. Hopefully it’s inspiring change.

Interview by Matt Hempstead