Cotton Incorporated has announced the launch of a brand new, extensive life cycle inventory and life cycle analysis of cotton products as part of its ‘Cotton Foundation VISION 21 Project’ which aims to establish current and accurate benchmarks of potential environmental impacts across the global cotton supply chain.

The project, which has taken Cotton Inc. two years of intensive research to complete with the help of and participation of the National Cotton Council and Cotton Council International, is based on peer-reviewed data which was collected and modelled according to the ISO-14040 standard for life cycle analyses.

Immediate top line findings of the study were that the consumer use phase represents the largest opportunity for environmental gains, which echoes the findings of other similar studies. For cotton agriculture, it was found the biggest impacts are due to nitrogen (fertiliser production), ginning (energy) and irrigation; whereas in cotton textile processing, activities that start with the opening of bales and end with spinning have the greatest impact on the environment and energy, while batch dyeing has the largest impact in this phase for water use.

The LCA is cotton-centric, meaning it does not compare the environmental impact of cotton to competitive fibers. “The cotton LCA is about measurement, not marketing,” says Berrye Worsham, Cotton Incorporated President and CEO. “The textile industry and consumers alike are weary of competition-motivated green marketing.  This project is about facts, and establishing a baseline to measure cotton’s environmental gains moving forward.”

The study takes a holistic and comprehensive view of the life cycle of cotton textile products. The life cycle inventory (LCI) is a quantification of relevant energy and material inputs and environmental release data associated with the production of cotton from cradle-to-gate (fibre) and manufacturing from gate-to-gate (fabric). The associated life cycle assessment (LCA) models the environmental impact of representative cotton apparel (a knit golf shirt and woven cotton trousers) from the field through to consumer care, use and disposal (cradle-to-grave).

Cotton Inc reports that data for the cradle-to-gate segment was collected from the three largest cotton producing countries (China, India, and the United States) and reported as a global average. Similarly, the data for the textile processing phase was culled from surveys among representative mills in the four largest textile processing areas (Turkey, India, China, and Latin America) and are also presented as a global average.  Data for the cut-and-sew and consumer use phase were supplemented by a range of credible secondary sources.

The LCI data collection and LCA modeling were undertaken by PE International and the data sets will be made available through such widely used databases as Ecoinvent and the U.S. Life Cycle Inventory, as well as via a reporting tool slated for availability in early 2012.