Looking for Environmental Scoring: A Case Study of a Portuguese Cotton White T-Shirt Made with Recycled Fiber

Abstract

Promoting sustainable consumer behavior is now an obligation under new European legislation, requiring life cycle assessment (LCA) for accurate environmental impact evaluation. Portugal is a key textile producer with an edge in competitiveness in sustainable textile production, driven by electricity-reduced carbon footprints and closed-loop manufacturing. Additionally, while simple spreadsheets can estimate a product’s carbon footprint, openLCA v1.11.0 software, combined with the ecoinvent database, greatly enhances environmental footprint calculations by integrating diverse impact categories that are otherwise difficult to estimate. In this study, openLCA is used to evaluate the environmental footprint of a white T-shirt made in Portugal with 50% recycled cotton from post-industrial wastes combined with 50% organic cotton from Turkey to assist in the design of environmental key performance indicators (KPI). The RECIPE and EF methods (adapted) are used to calculate the environmental impacts and allow aggregation into a single score. The KPI related to the global warming impact is validated using a spreadsheet calculator. We propose an “Envi-Score” based on an A-to-E classification for benchmarking and better communication with the buyers. E is set as the normalized environmental impact of the European benchmark for a mixture of material T-shirts encompassing cradle-to-gate boundaries. The introduction of recycled cotton produced in Portugal proves to be environmentally beneficial over organic and conventional cotton. Organic cotton proves to be beneficial in comparison with conventional cotton for most environmental categories, except for the ones affected by the lower production yield, for example, land use. The hotspots for the main impact categories are identified, and finally, a labeling scheme is proposed to clearly inform about the environmental performance of the products and avoid greenwashing with the “Envi-Score” rate, carbon footprint, land use, and water depletion.