Sustainability Efforts in the Textile Industry: EPDs and Eco-labels

Like many industries, initiatives are underway to increase the sustainability of textile and garment manufacturing. The Sustainable Apparel Coalition is working with the Earthsure program of The Institute for Environmental Research and Education (IERE) to produce a framework for declarations on the environmental impacts derived from life cycle analysis for some typical clothing products. Bluesign operates an auditing system to decrease human and ecological toxicity and resource use in all manufacturing steps. And the OEKO-TEX Association has produced standards to ensure very low levels of harmful and toxic substances in final textile products. These sustainability programs can be roughly divided into two methods – those using environmental product declarations (EPDs) and those using eco-label programs.

An Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) is a document that discloses quantified environmental data from a life cycle assessment (LCA) for a product or service. An EPD can be thought of as a summary of a LCA, or as Earthsure describes it, “a nutrition label” for environmental impacts. All EPDs must follow a set of rules, called Product Category Rules, which stipulate how the LCA will be conducted, what the functional unit is, and what environmental impact categories will be modeled. EPDs are designed to assist in the comparison of similar products on environmental performance. However, care must be taken in making comparisons between EPDs – each EPD compared must have followed the same PCR, have the same functional unit, and should have used similar assumptions and methods in generating the LCA. In general, most EPDs are produced for business-to-business communication to facilitate purchasing decisions. However, EPDs can be produced for business-to-consumer use. For the garment industry, the Sustainable Apparel Coalition with Earthsure has produced a series of Product Category Rules (PCRs) to assist the production of EPDs for garments such as T-shirts, Trousers/Slacks/Shorts, and Coats/Jackets. Ecosystem Analytics Inc. participated in the comment period for these PCRs – both comments to the draft PCRs and responses by Earthsure can be found here.

According to the Global Ecolabeling Network , an eco-label is a “label which identifies overall, proven environmental preference of a product or service within a specific product/service category”. GEN states that “In contrast to ‘green’ symbols, or claim statements developed by manufacturers and service providers, the most credible eco-labels are based on life cycle considerations; they are awarded by an impartial third-party in relation to certain products or services that are independently determined to meet transparent environmental leadership criteria”. For the programs we have described, both Bluesign and OEKO-TEX Standard 100 would be considered eco-labels, not EPDs.

For further information on the differences between these approaches for these programs, see Eileen Ekstrom’s comments in the LCA in Industry LinkedIn group.