Paper money has been circulated from one single supplier in the U.S. - Crane & Co. In the 90s, they had to overhaul their entire production process, all because of lycra-laced, skin tight denim. That's right. Your skinny jeans almost ruined paper money.

Crane has been the go-to paper money supplier in the U.S., and the company had been depending on unwanted scraps of denim sold in bulk by manufacturers in the garment industry.

They turn the denim into cotton blend paper by bleaching and processing the discarded scraps. That gets them about 30 percent of the fibers from the denim. The scraps were the single largest source of cotton for Crane.

Then the hipsters came.

Garment designers realized that they could blend spandex and denim to create skin tight jeans, so they took the new technique and ran with it. Because of that, it is rare to find jeans today that are anywhere near 100 percent pure Grade A denim.

As The Washington Post learned from Jerry Rudd, managing director of global sourcing for Crane:
Even a single fiber of spandex can ruin a batch of currency paper, degrading the strength of the material. But separating the spandex from the cotton would be a Herculean task, Rudd said. By the early 2000s, almost every pair of jeans contained at least a hint of stretch — rendering them useless to Crane
Crane has gone straight to "natural fiber" now, since they are no longer able to purchase recyclable bits. They have to buy their cotton from raw distributors. Who would have thought the fashion industry would have had such an impact like this. [The Washington Post]