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Lecture Notes

Here we see a graphic depiction of the life-cycle assessment of a pair of 501 Levi's jeans. It begins with the cotton being grown in West Texas or the Mississippi Delta or in Brazil and it concludes with the disposal in a landfill or disposal via incineration. What's striking to me, throughout this whole process, is the number of times the product is moved, the number of steps it takes to produce a pair of Levi's, and then finally, the distances traveled in the production of these pants. Evaluating the environmental inputs at each step goes into the life-cycle assessment.