80% of climate impact of clothes happen during production

Photo: Mista Future Fashion

This might sound surprising to many. Most consumers in Sweden might be aware of that the clothes they find in the fast fashion stores are not produced in Europe. A common conclusion made is that the long distance results in high carbon emissions, which is absolutely correct, but it’s low compare to the climate impact during production.

The method behind these facts are based on a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) - which takes into consideration all the steps from raw material to end of life. In other words, extraction of material, energy consumption, manufacture, transportation, use, recycling and final disposal.

The LCA figures of textiles in Sweden, mentioned above, is based on a research report from Mistra Future Fashion and the authors are Gustav Sandin, Sandra Roos & Björn Spak (RISE) Bahareh Zamani & Greg Peters (Chalmers University of Technology). In the report six garments were being studied, a T-shirt, socks, a jacket and so on and the report also showed that the travels to the stores in Sweden also has a high carbon footprint, 11 % of the whole life-cycle of garments.

Swedes have a clothing carbon footprint of 330 kg per person and year which is only 3% of their total carbon footprint, but still too high considering how much we need to cut carbon emissions to meet the Paris Agreement!

For those of you who want to dig deeper can read the report from 2019 here! It’s in english, well-written and easy to follow even if you’re not used to read scientific papers.