GLOBE 2016: Levi Strauss VP Kobori on Sustainability Progress and Goals

Posted March 9, 2016 by Sheila Shayon

As VP of Sustainability for Levi Strauss & Co., Michael Kobori has led the charge to become an environmental leader since 2001. Today the company is a trailblazer across multiple categories, leading to it once again being named to the distinguished World’s Most Ethical Companies list by the Ethisphere Institute.

“The initial push for corporate social responsibility, at least in the apparel sector, came in the early 1990s when manufacturing moved overseas,” Kobori told the organizers of the GLOBE conference on sustainable business ahead of his panel on March 3rd, titled “Transformational Companies: A Spotlight on Best Practices.”

“The whole notion that labor standards were important, and that it was a risk companies needed to manage was not part of mainstream corporate thinking at that time,” Kobori stated. “We were ahead of the curve, and 25 years ago established a comprehensive code of conduct for our suppliers worldwide.”

“Today, we are asking ourselves: ‘How can we think about the people who make our products, in places like Cambodia and Bangladesh and Haiti, and actually improve their lives? What do they need?’ We are beginning to address the full well-being of the people who make our products,” Kobori said.

“We have made it a requirement of our supply chain. Any supplier that aspires to be a vendor of Levi Strauss & Co. will need to, by 2020, have a worker wellbeing policy in place,” he added. “By 2020 we will reach 150,000 workers who are making our products around the world. Today we have 20 vendors signed up to this commitment, and are reaching about 75,000 workers.”

“A big piece is this whole idea of the circular economy, being able to take back and recycle old clothing into new clothing—taking the fibers spinning it back into yarn that can be used to create a new pair of Levis,” Kobori added of a consumer mindfulness effort that has seen CEO Chip Bergh encourage customers to conserve water by washing their jeans less often. “That is our ambition to create that, so we aren’t harvesting fiber from fields but instead from people’s closets.”

In addition to recycling water used to make denim, Levi Strauss has been recycling denim, as highlighted at the Levi’s Field of Jeans event at San Francisco’s Levi’s Stadium. That’s where Levi’s staffers and fans covered the field in 18,850 pairs of donated jeans in a massive recycling drive, Levi Strauss & Co has been recycling at Levi’s US stores.

It started with a pilot project in January 2014 with I:CO that expanded to all US stores in July 2015 with a 20 percent off voucher, and it’s a commitment that it’s in the midst of expanding overseas in the wake of a successful recycling campaign in the UK.

Now, according to Levi’s, “Consumers in the UK can drop off any brand of clean, dry clothing or shoes in a specially installed collection box at their local Levi’s® store and will receive a voucher for 10 percent off a single, regular-priced Levi’s® item in-store. Our goal is to roll out the project across the rest of Europe by the end of 2017.”

Asked by GLOBE if business is dragging government along on the issue Kobori said, “It was really remarkable to see what was happening in Paris at COP21; it really was the private sector that provided that push to governments to reach that agreement. That is an important example of where we are in that evolution; you see companies like Unilever and Nike that are making sustainability a key part of their value proposition, and showing other companies that yes this can be profitable and it is the wave of the future.”