Why your jeans are making it difficult to print money
Stretchy jeans are great – softer, possibly more flattering, and they shrink a bit after washing – but it turns out that they're causing a bit of an issue for the dollar, reports Vogue's Laura Milligan.
Crane, the company that, for over 100 years, has single-handedly supplied the paper used to make America's currency, has got a problem on its hands. It used to source 30 per cent of the cotton it makes the bills with from old and unwanted denim, but adding Lycra to jeans means that it's now become unusable.
Lycra diminishes the strength of denim and, therefore, the strength of bills.
"There are no denim products out there that we can find that are basically not contaminated," Jerry Rudd, Crane's managing director of global sourcing, told the Washington Post. "Everybody's into it. Denim and Lycra are everywhere. It's just incredible what's happened to the industry."
Crane made the decision to start getting cotton straight from source, so all is not lost. But of course, with the announcement today that the Bank of England will be producing Britain's first plastic notes in 2016, it can't be long before the Lycra danger becomes a polymer one.