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Congrès International sur l’Analyse du Cycle de Vie Lille, Novembre 2011
Apparel: complexity of a sector
How to choose the best life cycle scenario?
Inès BOUFATEH* , **, Anne PERWUELZ* , **, Besoa RABENASOLO* , ***, Anne-Marie Jolly-Desodt****
*Univ Lille Nord de France, F-59000 Lille, France
**ENSAIT - GEMTEX, F-59056 Roubaix, France
*** Ecole Centrale de Lille - LM²O, F-59651 Villeneuve d’Ascq France
****Institut Prisme - Polytech Orléans, 8 rue Leonard de Vinci, 45072 Orléans Cedex2, France
ines.boufateh@ensait.fr; anne.perwuelz@ensait.fr; besoa.rabenasolo@ensait.fr;
anne-marie.jolly@univ-orleans.fr
Keywords: LCA, scenarios, MultiCriteria Decision Aid (MCDA), apparel industry.
Background
The textile apparel is a simple product: a T-shirt, for example, is made of two components that are
knitted fabric and sewing thread. However, this product comes from a very complex industry. Indeed, a
multitude of materials, manufacturing scenarios and supply chain strategies exist for the same product,
which generates hundreds of production scenarios. Diversity of consumer behavior in use and end of life
phases increases more the number of possible scenarios for the product life cycle. Consequently, the
environmental impact assessment of textiles scenarios is complex. The decision in choosing the best
environmental profile is conflictual. Authors’ objective consists in aiding to highlight answers to these
questions: “how to make the interpretation of LCA results easier in order to identify the good trade-off of
scenarios minimizing the environmental impacts of textiles life cycles?”
Life Cycle Assessment in the textile field
The textile industry is composed of several different activities. In addition to this diversity, the
textile field is also characterized by the variety of raw materials from agriculture, chemical and oil industry.
The textile processes such as fibres preparation, spinning, knitting or weaving, pre-treatments, dyeing,
finishing, garment making and packaging are also quite varied. Therefore, the modelling of “what if”
scenarios in Life Cycle Assessment is complex. Indeed, even the product is simple such as a cotton T-
shirt, the number of possible manufacturing scenarios is huge. If we consider the diversity in cotton fibres’
origins (type of agriculture) and in processes of spinning, knitting, pre-treatments, dyeing and finishing, 720
scenarios should be modelled [1]. In addition to the large number of possible scenarios for the same
product, interpreting textile LCA results is quite complex. In order to illustrate this complexity through a
simple example, four scenarios of a T-shirt life cycle are modelled with changing fibres and adequate
processes for each.
FIG. 1 – Comparison of life cycle scenarios of cotton, lyocell, viscose and polyester T-shirts with
normalization on cotton scenario
FIG. 1 shows that the cotton T-shirt is the best at three environmental impacts: acidification (ADP),
marine aquatic ecotoxicity (MAETP) and photochemical ozone creation (POCP) potentials. If we compare
it to polyester scénario, it is worse at eutrophication (EP), fresh water aquatic ecotoxicity (FAETP), human
toxicity (HTP), ozone layer depletion (ODP) and terrestrial ecotoxicity potentials (TETP). This analysis
does not allow us to make judgment for cotton and polyester scenarios according to their eco-profiles since
we do not have sufficient knowledge about the weightiness of each impact.
In order to compare and to rank life cycle scenarios according to their eco-profiles, the need to
apply a multicriteria decision aid (MCDA) method increases with the number of assessed scenarios.
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