Neuw Denim co-founder Par Lundqvist talks about the brand's sustainability journey. The brand is based in Melbourne and is stocked in General Pants, David Jones and select boutiques.
How did you first venture into becoming more sustainable and what were your first steps?
Sustainability isn’t something that we as a brand decided to take on in our manufacturing process, it is something that the current state of our planet, the future of our children, and the world around us demanded of us.
It was imperative we changed not only our approach to development, manufacturing, and supply chain but also everyday habits.
We MUST re-look at our entire business and shift our thinking to a more responsible and sustainable process. Our staff, our designers, our factories, and our laundries are all focused on decreasing our footprint in many different ways.
From simple things like the lightbulbs in our offices and recycling paper from our printers to major overhauls like ensuring we only use a 100% recycled water and working to eliminate harmful chemicals from our manufacturing process.
What have been some of your biggest achievements in that space when it comes to textiles and the supply chain?
All jeans and denim in our collections have been produced using sustainable methods. They have been cut by socially compliant factories and we are extremely proud to say that 100% of the water used in our manufacturing process is reused and recycled with 0% waste discharged as contaminated sewage.
Throughout our ranges, we choose to adopt a large percentage of Australian Cotton into our denim. Australian Cotton is the most premium quality, environmentally responsibly grown cotton available that we have found. It is grown locally using industry leading water practices and pesticide prevention.
We have also just released our first sustainable capsule called ZERO. An initiative that completely replaces traditional denim manufacturing processes such as stone-washing and PP spray and allows us to decrease our carbon footprint even further.
With ZERO specifically, we decided to completely overhaul the washing process, simply because it was the biggest immediate impact we could make. ZERO is something Neuw has been working on for years and finally, we’ve got the product and process at a point that we are happy to release to our customers.
Instead of spraying the garment with potentially harmful additives such as potassium permanganate to replicate wear patterns and wash effects, ZERO garments are hand-stitched prior to wash and hand brushed to produce a genuine creased and faded aesthetic without the use of any harmful chemicals.
In addition to this, ZERO eliminates classic stone-washing methods by using synthetic stones in replace of traditional pumice stones. This newly adopted process leaves no sludge behind which allows us to clean and recycle the water in an energy efficient manner which significantly decreases our carbon footprint.
ZERO is the next level of innovation which points the way towards a cleaner future.
What are your future goals here?
Fashion is such an imperfect business and we admit to being a part of it. We have clear and specific goals for a cleaner, greener, and brighter future. We are not as good as we want to be yet but we are certainly making significant progress every day.
Denim manufacturing is our focus and obsession. We are completely committed to making socially and environmentally sustainable choices right through this process, and for our consumers, we know this is an absolute requirement and complete expectation.
What's the biggest challenge involved in becoming sustainable?
Unfortunately (and ironically) being more sustainable, more responsible, and more transparent isn’t cheap, time-efficient or easy.
Creating garments that you’re proud to put in the market knowing that you are lessening your carbon footprint and helping to contribute to a better, cleaner future comes with major supply and manufacturing hurdles.
Lead times become longer, the cost of development becomes more expensive and you must place a large amount of trust in your factories that they have the same vision you do as a brand. However, regardless of these on-going challenges, we believe it’s worth the result.
We know that as new, better, cleaner, manufacturing innovations and practices become available we must embrace them and open to abandoning the old and traditional methods.