Mud Jeans has long found favour with its commitment to bettering the denim ecosystem. When it unveiled 100% post-consumer recycled denim this past summer, though, it showed itself to be once more ahead of the pack. Inside Denim chats to the brand’s CSR officer, Lea Landsberg, to find out more.

The town of Laren in the Netherlands, located 30 kilometres or so east of Amsterdam, is known to have served as an artists’ colony at least twice in its history. As the pace of industrialisation picked up across the country, painters living and working during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries increasingly found themselves drawn to depicting the area’s then relatively unspoiled bucolic landscape and its inhabitants. Today, Laren finds itself once more a locus of nature-inspired creativity as the home of Dutch denim label Mud Jeans, a brand so moved to close the fashion loop that it embarked on a three-year journey to pioneer the “first” jeans made from 100% post-consumer recycled (PCR) denim back in 2019. On June 21, 2022, the company announced that it had achieved its goal via a livestreamed watch party hosted by actress and sustainability advocate Jennifer Hoffman.

Navigating the environment

Known as ‘Road to 100’, the project sought to spur the development of denim made entirely from PCR fibres by building upon earlier efforts by the label, beginning in 2015. It was at this stage in its history, three years after Bert van Son acquired the brand in 2012, that Mud Jeans began incorporating PCR denim in its blends, Ms Landsberg tells us. By the time it started down the ‘Road to 100’ a few years later, the jeanmaker was already selling rigid fabrics containing 40% PCR alongside 60% Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS)-approved organic cotton, created in partnership with Valencian collaborators Recover, Ferre and Tejidos Royo.

As described in Inside Denim previously, Recover’s role was – and still is, with the brand’s main lines – to process used denim and mix the recycled fibres with GOTS cotton, before Ferre spins the blended fibres back into yarns, which are then woven into denim by Tejidos Royo. Finally, the fabrics are cut, sewn and finished on a single site by Tunisia’s Yousstex International. Another, stretchier version is made up of 75% GOTS cotton, 23% PCR denim and 2% elastane.

Mud Jeans also abides by the Jeans Redesign guidelines, an initiative spearheaded by UK circular economy think tank The Ellen MacArthur Foundation, since July 2019. To this end, it deliberately designs out elements that may hinder recycling at end of life, from eliminating leather back patches to reducing rivets and buttons (now made of stainless steel in line with Nordic Swan Ecolabel specifications). While its own take-back model and Lease A Jeans scheme, first launched in 2013, does allow the brand to generate some PCR cotton of its own, it does not collect enough used denim to satisfy in-house demand for the fibre at present.

Pushing forward

The 100% PCR men’s denim shorts that Mud Jeans presented to the world in June were realised through close collaboration with researchers at the Saxion University of Applied Sciences in the east of the Netherlands, in addition to existing partners Recover and Ferre, plus fibre manufacturer Lenzing. Saxion’s reputation for textile innovation, especially when it comes to experimenting with recycled fibres, made it an ideal partner, Ms Landsberg says. Its specialists helped crystalise the label’s goals significantly and worked to ensure that sustainable, efficient production remained a priority from start to finish, she adds.

First steps included identifying the need to add chemically recycled fibres to the yarn, followed by experimenting with the ratio of chemically versus mechanically recycled cotton present in the blend. A further challenge involved reaching agreement on the “most sustainable” chemical recycling process. Ultimately, the team opted to use N-Methylmorpholine-N-oxide (NMMO), a solvent used by Lenzing in lyocell production that is capable of dissolving and regenerating cellulose fibres such as cotton. According to Mud Jeans co-owner Dion Vijgeboom, speaking during the June watch party, the sample shorts were a mix of 33% chemically recycled and 67% mechanically recycled post-consumer cotton. This had resulted in a prototype fabric with a slightly softer hand feel than traditional denim, Mr Vijgeboom told viewers, but he also acknowledged that changes would be made over time as the collaborators tweaked the proportion of chemically recycled fibres, for example. Ms Landsberg similarly suggests that the brand will increase the yarn count of the fabric to give it a different look and slightly heavier feel.

Another important aspect, and perhaps the most challenging, was choosing between ring and rotor (open-end) spinning. Numerous testing rounds proved that rotor technology performed better for 100% PCR material than the ring-spun samples, although both spinning techniques were found to “have their own benefits”, Ms Landsberg states. The brand considered the rotor-spun samples to be “very promising”, not only in terms of the quality of the fabrics made, but also their durability. Researching and experimenting with various potential denim washes is next on the horizon. During a question-and-answer session following the ‘Road to 100’ watch party, Mr Vijgeboom remarked that PCR cellulosic fibres other than cotton, such as hemp, may form part of Mud Jeans’ 100% recycled denim line-up in the future, but this is not in the company’s immediate plans.

Rather, scaling up production of its fully recycled cotton denim is of primary importance, with the label hoping to launch jeans of this kind in around a year’s time, Ms Landsberg tells us. “With this being an unprecedented effort, we expect to encounter several challenges along the way,” she says, but discussions between the label and its partners to firm up the timeline are already under way. As for price, the team will also work to increase the affordability of apparel made from 100% PCR fabrics ahead of its retail debut. 

New terrain

In late August, Mud Jeans released a capsule collection with Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum, dedicated to the work of nineteenth-century Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh and his contemporaries. Created from a blend of 50% GOTS cotton, 30% hemp and 20% PCR cotton, the fabrics were this time produced by Turkish manufacturer Calik Denim using Cradle to Cradle-certified indigo dye, with Yousstex cutting, sewing and finishing the final denim jeans, jackets, aprons and bags. The brand only started using this denim this year. Each piece features details which hark back to the life of the artist, such as lasered sentences from his personal correspondence and embroidery inspired by paintings including Almond Blossom and Self-Portrait with Grey Felt Hat. According to marketing material, the capsule was inspired by the label’s passion for the beauty of the natural world and optimism about the future, values it says it shares with the institution.

Somewhat fittingly, then, in light of its own sustainability journey, Mud Jeans also picks out a line from a letter Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo on July 22, 1883: “Having hope for better times should not be a feeling, but a doing in the present”. The jeanmaker shows no sign of straying from its eco-mission any time soon.

Although the need to incorporate chemically recycled fibres in the 100% PCR yarn was identified early on, mechanically recycling cotton-rich discarded denims was still a major part of the process. The first fabric samples contained 67% mechanically recycled cotton and 33% chemically recycled cotton.

All photos: Mud Jeans

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