Sustainable Fashion: Intersectional Life Cycle Assessment

The Challenge

The fashion industry is one of the most environmentally impactful industrial sectors in the world. This is particularly true for the fast fashion industry, which relies on cheap manufacturing, impulsive consumer buying, and poor-quality garments. Environmental flash points in textile and fashion value chain include significant water use, chemical pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and textile waste (Niinimaki et al., 2020; Shirvanimoghaddam et al., 2020). Social flash points include exploitative labor practices and excessive waste increasingly shipped to landfills in rural low- and middle-income countries (Ferrante et a., 2009; Herrera Almanza & Corona, 2020, EURATEX, 2020). This case study develops new a methodology—Intersectional Life Cycle Assessment (I-LCA)—to highlight amplifying feedback loops joining Environmental Life Cycle Assessment (E-LCA) and Social Life Cycle assessment (S-LCA). Our goal is to identify innovations for the study of the fashion industry as well as the fashion industry itself.

Environmental and social impacts of the fashion industry are exacerbated by the rise of cheaply produced fast fashion. While many of the emblematic fast fashion brands were founded in the mid-twentieth century (H&M debuted in Sweden in 1947 and Zara in Spain in 1975), fast fashion as a phenomenon did not emerge until the 1990s. In this period, fashion retailers restructured the supply chain to allow for high “speed to market” times, enabling hyper-trendy products and impulse buys. Representatives of Zara, for instance, famously announced their mission to bring clothing from idea to stores in 15 days (Schiro, 1989). Now, Zara, and H&M, alongside other fast fashion retailers like UNIQLO, Gap, and Topshop, have been joined by ultra-fast fashion retailers with no brick-and-mortar stores. These ultra-fast fashion companies, like China-based Shein, are operated wholly online and leverage social media platforms like TikTok to catalyze instantaneous impulse purchases. These trends have more than tripled the global production of clothing in the past two decades (Chang, 2020).

Intersectional Innovation 1: Intersectional Life Cycle Assessment

E- and S-LCA are often done separately. S-LCA, by virtue of its focus on society, rarely examines impacts on living organisms or broader environmental impacts at the ecosystem level. At the same time E-LCA rarely considers the impact of environmental disruptions on a societal level. I-LCA offers methodological insights interweaving E-LCA and S-LCA. I-LCA closes the loop to show the anthropogenic impacts on the environment—and the impacts of the environment on humans.

Intersectional feedback loops joining E-LCA and S-LCA, illustrated through the example of fast fashion. Intersectional Life Cycle Assessment (I-LCA) analyses how environmental and social life cycles intersect for a more global understanding of product impacts—on both the physical environment and human society.

I-LCA connects E- and S-LCA to depict cause-effects pathways that connect fast fashion supply chains with food supply chains, as illustrated in the figure above. Here we break the process down into six steps:

1) Consumer behavior: The fast fashion industry is fuelled by impulsive consumer buying, cheap manufacturing, and poor-quality garments. This demand differs by ethnicity, gender, geographic location, and socioeconomic status (see Intersectional Innovation 2 below).

2) Pollutants discharged: The fast fashion supply chain produces plastic fibers that are released when polyester and other polymer-based textiles are laundered; these fibers comprise between 20% and 35% of the microplastics discharged into the ocean. These textiles also contain added chemicals, including pesticide residue and additives used to make clothing stain-resistant (Editorial Board, 2022).

3) Sex-specific effects in living organisms: Microplastics and chemicals can impact marine ecosystems. For instance, BPA is a phenolic endocrine disruptor found in some articles of clothing. BPA in the ocean can deeply impact marine animals. For instance, BPA disrupts reproduction, metabolism, and development in clams (Rangia cuneate, for example, where the larger females experience greater exposure, Graca et al., 2021). Similarly, polyethylene microplastics cause greater oxidative damage to female Mediterranean mussels (Mytilus galloprovincialis) than to males (Abidli et al., 2021).

4) Impacts disrupt marine populations and ecosystems: These disruptions can cause infertility or sex change that affect demographic pattern and, potentially, lead to population collapse (Duft et al., 2007; Riva et al., 2010). These effects impact population ecology—and, ultimately, the entire food web, where bivalves are ecologically important and socio-economically value as seafood cultivated and consumed worldwide (Beyer et al., 2017).

5) Food stock disruptions: Microplastic and nanoplastic particles containing multiple manufactured chemicals also enter the tissues of marine organisms, including seafoods consumed by humans (Landrigan et al., 2020; Santillo et al., 2017; Mercogliano et al., 2020).

6) Food insecurity and sex-specific human health effects from contaminated food: I-LCA links fast fashion to disruption of marine organism life and links this back to impacts on humans in the form of food insecurity and sex-specific health effects. A recent study based on assessment of commonly consumed food items estimates that an average person consumes between 74,000 and 121,000 microplastic particles per year. Importantly, particle consumption varies by age, sex, dietary patterns, educational background, and geographic location, meaning that microplastic and chemicals can differently affect men, women, and children (Cox et al., 2019; Kim et al., 2020; Gunawan et al. 2021). Microplastic levels and compositions in human feces, for example, were significantly higher in Hong Kong than in other towns in East Asia and Europe (one factor being the widespread use of polystyrene takeaway containers in Hong Kong—Ho et al., 2022). As top consumers of ocean-based food webs, humans likely accumulate contaminants, which may have impacts on reproductive health and other bodily processes (Galloway, 2015). The effects can be sex-specific (Landrigan et al., 2020), as in the case of the different risk of future coronary artery disease from exposure to BPA for men and women (Melzer et al., 2012).

Intersectional Innovation 2: Refining S-LCA

Intersectionality refines S-LCA by drilling down into major stakeholders—workers, consumers, and local communities—to consider intersectional factors related to age, gender, geographical location, race/ethnicity, sex, socioeconomic status, etc. I-LCA is a transformative tool that explicitly analyzes intersectional factors shaping the fashion industry relevant to both policymakers and industry.

Example 1. I-LCA goes beyond analyzing impacts of fast fashion on societies to examine causes, in this case, how consumer behavior—differentially driven by social norms, including educational background, gender, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, etc.—fuel fast fashion. Gender norms, in particular, pressure women—young and old—to focus on appearance, fashion, and beauty, and thus to overconsume (McNeill & Moore, 2015). In Western cultures, dress, especially for women, is a way to express wealth, social standing, and individual identity. As men adopted a uniform of subdued business dress in the nineteenth century, urban bourgeoise women used dress to signal social status: the finer the better (Davis, 1992; Gieske, 2000). These sociocultural gender norms continue to motivate women’s greater attention to fashion. Zara, for example, report their product line by women's (60%), men's (25%) and the fast-growing children's (15%) departments (Harbott, 2011). As gender norms become less binary, men are catching up in fashion demands. In addition, the white-shirt industry itself is an environmental burden (Herrera Almanza & Corona, 2020). Using I-SLCA allows for better understandings of the social dynamics of consumer demand and may also lead to solutions. Social norms, when coupled with action from the textile industry to support a circular economy, can change to support sustainable fashion (Editorial, 2022).

Adapted from Fontes, J., Gaasbeek, A., Goedkoop, M.J. (2016). Handbook for Product Social Impact Assessment 3.0.
Roundtable for Product Social Metrics, Table 12. Social topics per stakeholder group.

Next Steps

Policy and legislation can serve as catalysts for a circular economy for textiles.

• • The European Commission adopted an EU strategy for sustainable and circular textiles March 2022. Specific rules for textiles, including product requirements, digital passport, green public procurement, disclosure of discarded products, and measures banning the destruction of unsold textiles, are planned for 2024 (European Commission, 2022b).
• • The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology emphasizes that cohesive policy is needed to support cross-sectoral collaboration to transition to a circular economy for textiles (see image right; Schumacher & Forster, 2022).
• • India is adopting a circular economy for textiles to retain their competitive edge in this sector (Hari & Mitra, 2022).
• • China is taking steps to increase its textile waste recycling (Lipiang, 2022).