The most useful thing to know before buying recycled jeans is that the percentage of recycled content tells you very little about how they'll wear. A pair can be forty per cent recycled cotton and still hold its shape beautifully, or barely ten per cent and bag out at the knee within a month. Read the fabric weight and blend, not the marketing line on the swing tag.
What separates a good pair from a disappointing one comes down to how the recycled fibre has been blended. Pure recycled cotton on its own tends to be shorter staple, which means less strength, so a bit of elastane or a small percentage of virgin cotton woven in usually makes for a denim that recovers its shape rather than one that stretches out by lunchtime and stays there. Check the weight too, anything too light will go thin at the inner thigh faster than you'd like. Decent stitching on the inseam, a proper rivet rather than a flat stud, and a finish that looks like it's been washed into the denim rather than sprayed on are all signs someone thought about the construction, not just the fibre source.
For fit, I go up half a size in anything with a high recycled content, because the stretch recovery is often weaker than conventional denim with the same percentage elastane. They can feel perfect in the changing room and then drop an inch by the second wear. Watch the waistband gape at the back if you've got a smaller waist to hip ratio, that's the fit problem that shows up most in this fabric, since the recycled weave doesn't always have the structure to hold a curve the way denser conventional denim does.
Before you buy, stretch a seam between your fingers in the shop and see how quickly it springs back. Check the inside of the waistband for a second layer of reinforcement, that's usually the first place to go. Hold the denim up to the light, if you can see through it at the knee already, it will be worse after ten washes.
I've had recycled jeans that softened nicely and kept their colour for two winters, and others that pilled at the thigh after three washes and went grey at the seams within a season, thrown in a bag on a train more times than they deserved. Wash them inside out, cold, and don't tumble dry if you want them to last.
If in doubt between two sizes, size up rather than down, recycled denim rarely stretches to meet you.
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