A How-to-Guide for Product Impact Measurement in Fashion

Conducting a Product Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a comprehensive method for evaluating the environmental impacts of a product, like a trench of fabric or an entire collection, throughout its entire life cycle, from raw material extraction to disposal.

This systematic approach helps fashion companies understand and mitigate the environmental footprint of their products, leading to more sustainable practices, informed decision-making and legislation compliance.

In this article, we will outline the fundamental stages of an LCA, providing a clear framework for understanding how this valuable tool can be applied in the textile and fashion industry.

This article is part of our comprehensive guide A Deep Dive into Product LCAs.

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What is Life Cycle Assessment?

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is an internationally standardised methodology designed to quantify the environmental pressures related to goods, the environmental benefits, the trade-offs and areas for achieving improvements taking into account the full life-cycle of the product.

LCA follows a holistic approach by studying systems in their entirety rather than focusing on specific components of a product. It also avoids ‘burden shifting’ by encompassing multiple environmental impact categories.

Across all (or most of) its lifecycle stages, a product draws resources from the environment and the technosphere. An LCA study aims at quantifying the impact of this exchange of resources and emissions between the product system and the environment.

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4 Steps of a LCA Study

The process of an LCA can be broken down into four essential steps: Goal and Scope Definition, Life Cycle Inventory Analysis, Life Cycle Impact Assessment, and Life Cycle Interpretation.

Each of these steps plays a crucial role in ensuring a thorough and accurate assessment, ultimately guiding companies towards more sustainable and efficient product designs.

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Step 1: Goal & Scope Definition

This step is crucial and ensures that your LCA is executed consistently. You need to define a goal and ask yourself: What are the objectives of performing the LCA study? Who is the intended audience?

The first important LCA compound to define in this step is the function provided by the product (e.g. ‘being able to wear this t-shirt until it breaks down’), the functional unit (e.g. ‘this t-shirt is worn 100 times’) and the amount of product necessary to fullfill the function (e.g. 0.5kg of cotton). You will see functional units often at comparative LCAs of products.

The system boundaries are also of critical importance in the Goal & Scope definition phase. What should be included or excluded? What technology are you using and which geographical area to cover? What’s the time period of the data collected? Are you using any allocation procedures? Are you going to do a cradle-to-gate, gate-to-gate or cradle-to-grave analysis?

Cradle-to-gate measures a product’s environmental footprint from raw material extraction until it leaves the factory gate. Cradle-to-grave includes all the steps from raw material extraction until the product is disposed of. Cradle-to-cradle goes even further than that: It measures all stages of a product’s impact from the raw material extraction to its recycling or upcycling.

How you define all those factors will highly affect the outcome of your LCA. More restrictive frameworks like PEFCR or EPD PRCs provide clear indications on how to set up the study and how systems have those models already in place.

It might sound overwhelming, but if you decide to run your Product LCA on Sustainable Brand Platform all steps you have to take are already modelled and prepared for you in a user-friendly interface so you will cut short immensely on this decision-making.

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Step 2: Life Cycle Inventory Analysis (LCI)

In this step, you will mainly collect data and do the modelling. This involves creating an inventory of the inputs and outputs for the products that you are going to study.

A Life Cycle inventory is a list of all the recourses extracted from the earth and the emissions to air, water, and soil. This list contains thousands of lines and Sustainable Brands Platform software helps to determine them. The resources and emissions are then matched with your selected impact categories based on expected potential types of environmental impacts.

Questions you need to ask yourself are: What are your material and energy inputs? What are the waste and emissions outputs for every process in every stage that you are collecting data for and model? After you collect all the data, the calculation comes into play which involves creating your model and relating that data to your functional unit.

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Step 3: Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA)

‍It’s now time for your environmental impact assessment which is about being able to consider the actual effects on humans, ecosystems, and resources, instead of merely tracking quantities like tons of emissions or gallons of fuel consumed as a result of production.

An LCIA method contains a set of LCIA impact categories. There are different impact methods and impact categories to choose from. If you run your LCA through Sustainable Brand Platform you will see impact categories such as global warming, land use, water footprint, fossil resource scarcity and ozone depletion.

In order to understand impact assessment, and thus LCIA, it is important to understand how LCI results may eventually connect to impacts: At the top are emissions, sometimes called stressors, because they are triggers for potential impacts.

Next in the chain are concentrations, which in the case of air emissions are the resulting contribution of increased emissions. As concentrations are changed in the environment, we would expect to see intermediate impacts.

Finally, damages arise from the impacts. These damages are also referred to as endpoints since they are the final part of the chain and represent the inevitable ending point with respect to the original stressors.

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At this stage, representable results are gathered that could be communicated in that way. Optionally a so-called normalization or weighting process can be applied to this data, depending on your business case.

Normalization conceptualizes the scores and puts them into the same unit such as points to help us understand if the outcome (e.g. 0.004kg phosphorous equivalent) is much or little in comparison to a reference.

Weighting combines normalized scores into a single score based on how much importance you give each category. Instead of deciding yourself, it is recommended and more common to use the weighting factors developed by the LCIA methods.

For example, you could decide that 0.1 of global warming equals 0.1 of ozone depletion. This can be controversial and is not a very common method to use. Nevertheless, it can be helpful if your company works with internal values of certain factors (e.g. global warming) or if the PEF method is followed.

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Step 4: Life Cycle Interpretation‍

‍Last but not least it’s time to interpret the data. This is done by a Contribution Analysis to see how much each process contributed to the overall impact. For example, you will be able to see if raw materials or dying processes are creating the biggest impacts.

The Contribution Analysis is followed up by a Sensitivity Analysis to determine how sensitive the model is to different assumptions. Meaning, you will be able to see how your assumptions and choices influence your results. If you would change certain factors what would the overall result look like? They could be the same or very different.

The Sensitivity Analysis is closely related to the Uncertainty Analysis that follows to mathematically calculate your time, geographical and technological representativeness as well as precision. The outcomes of the Uncertainty Analysis give an indication of how confident you can be with your data.

To put these interpretations into action it’s important to draw conclusions, explain limitations, and make recommendations, such as ‘Brand X should consider using a renewable energy source and less water in its dying and washing processes’. So the last step of this stage should provide clear and useful information for your business and decision-making.

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Conclusion on Life Cycle Assessment

Conducting a Life Cycle Assessment is a vital process for evaluating the comprehensive environmental impacts of a product, from its inception to its disposal, and mitigate them.

By systematically following the 4 key steps described above, fashion companies can gain profound insights into their collection and make them Ecodesign compliant.

Sustainable Brand Platform’s LCA tool has the ability to meet the needs of technical and non-technical users and can be scaled depending on your company’s needs.

It is compliant withinternational standards and can be conducted based on ISO, PEF or EPD methodology. You choose based on your product’s needs and our tool delivers the results in a user-friendly interface.

If you would like to know more about Product LCA and how it can be applied specifically for your business you can reach out to our Sustainability Success Team here. We are here to do the heavy lifting for you!

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