Linking the planetary boundaries to the life cycle environmental impacts of cotton T-shirts in the Netherlands: The implications and limitations of the application in term of impact-reduction strategy for clothing companies

Abstract

For the past few years, researchers has been attempting to apply the Planetary boundaries (PBs) to the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) framework, as they hope the connection would allow us to understand the impacts and limits of human activities towards the Earth system better, and to ultimately maintain the Holocene-like ecological state. One of the recent applications is the development of impact-reduction target for the life cycle environmental impacts of a product in relation to the PBs, of the which the first procedure for the development was introduced by Sandin et al. (2015) – which in this thesis the procedure was called “Sandin’s procedure”. Accordingly, the researchers applied the procedure to a case study of Swedish clothing consumption and use the result as guidance for the government to prioritize interventions for impact reduction. However, the results of their study were not beneficial for clothing companies to use as the scope of their environmental responsibility covers the entire value chain, not just the product consumption phase. Thus, the implications for the business sector has yet to be explored.

In this thesis, Sandin’s procedure was used to develop impact-reduction targets for the LCA of clothing products (from cradle-to-grave): the chosen case-study was cotton T-shirt used in the Netherlands. The main objective was to explore the implications in term of impact-reduction strategy for clothing companies. The research entailed both the LCA of the products and the development of the targets. By combining the result of both studies, the final result was used to interpret the implications, which mostly involved with the prioritization of impact category and phase of impact-reduction intervention, the advantageous location for business operation (where there are low environmental impacts and reduction targets). However, despite the implications, the results were concluded to be yet practical for implementation in term of the targets and even the concept of Sandin’s procedure itself. For the targets, many of them were extremely high, and it would require large-scale technological innovation and cross-industrial cooperation to achieve – thus, not logical to focus on a business sector scale. The scientific limitations of Sandin’s procedure also jeopardized the accuracy of the impact-reduction targets as well. These limitations were, for examples, the incompatibility between the PB and LCA, and the lack of concrete allocation method both for the specific market segment and geographical scope, which lead to further research recommendations for improving the concept.