Frozen Jeans

Being a responsible citizen of the earth might mean freezing your jeans.

According to Levi’s, one pair of jeans, from its inception in the cotton field to its demise in the recycling bin, uses over 900 gallons of water. To reduce the climate change impact of your jeans by 48% (yes, Levi’s is precise), you could wash them one quarter as much–maybe once a month instead of weekly.

Here, one man chronicles a year in the life of his jeans without washing them. Or, as the NY Times tells us, putting your jeans in the freezer kills the germs that make them smell.

The Levi’s story does take us to questions about using water wisely. Discussed in this podcast, depending on where and when, wise water use relates to its quality and quantity. For Nature, water use is a “cropping efficiency” issue that will help us feed everyone in 2050. And for one Indian cotton farmer, this NY Times article describes the beneficial impact of targeted irrigation

From 2007, here is a NY Times interactive on where in the world water is scarce.

The Economic Lesson

As economists, we can predict that an increase in the cost of water will become the most potent conservation incentive.

An Economic Question: Using demand and supply graphs, explain how price stimulates conservation and encourages production.