Evidence & Sources
Follow the data.
The Reuse Project is an experiment, not a sustainability label.
The premise is simple: before triggering another manufacturing cycle, find out whether capacity that already exists can solve the problem.
That means following actual material and energy flows—and being explicit about what the available data can and cannot tell us.
Here are some of the major sources and calculations behind the experiment.
Levi's® 501® Lifecycle Assessment
In 2015, Levi Strauss & Co. published a lifecycle assessment of a pair of Levi's® 501® jeans, examining impacts from fiber production through consumer care and end of life.
For one modeled pair, Levi's reported:
- 33.4 kg CO₂e total lifecycle climate impact
- 3,781 liters of water consumption
- 48.9 g PO₄-e eutrophication impact
- 12.0 m²/year land occupation
Importantly, the impacts occur in different places depending on what we're measuring. Consumer care was the largest modeled contributor to climate impact, while fiber production—predominantly cotton—dominated water consumption and land occupation.
The point isn't that one lifecycle stage always matters most. It's that we need to look at the actual system before choosing the intervention.
Read Levi Strauss & Co.'s full 2015 lifecycle assessment
Transportation: the 3,800-mile comparison
One of the questions The Reuse Project tests is whether an existing object becomes environmentally undesirable simply because it has to travel.
The U.S. EPA SmartWay model uses an average freight-truck emissions factor of approximately 210 grams CO₂ per short ton-mile.
For a one-pound object, that works out to approximately 0.105 grams CO₂ per mile of average truck freight.
Compare that with roughly 400 grams CO₂ per mile for an average passenger vehicle, and the order-of-magnitude result is:
One passenger-vehicle mile ≈ 3,800 average truck-freight miles for a one-pound object.
This is not 3,800 miles of parcel delivery. It is not a complete lifecycle analysis. And it does not mean “shipping is good.”
It's a modal transportation comparison that demonstrates why geography alone is a poor proxy for environmental impact.
EPA itself uses grams of CO₂ per ton-mile as one of its core metrics for evaluating freight efficiency.
What we're testing
We don't yet know how much new manufacture could be avoided by making existing capacity substantially easier to identify, access, maintain, exchange, and use.
That's the question.
The experiment isn't designed to prove that reuse always wins.
It's designed to help us discover:
Where does existing capacity work? Where does it fail? What gets in the way? And what would make the better option easier to choose?