Study On Several Crucial Issues About Industrial Carbon Footprint Of Textile And Apparel Products

Global climate change has been caused by industrialization and a huge amount of greenhouse gas emissions, which has become an important facing challenge of humanity today. In order to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions, the energy-saving emission reduction policies, the relevant standards, and product carbon footprint labels have been actively developed and promoted. While China has also positively take measures to promote energy-saving emissions reduction work. As the big country of production and export of textile and apparel products, China’s textile and garment industry has not yet got out of low efficiency, labor intensity, high energy consumption and high emissions. Therefore, the textile and apparel industry is the priority of promoting energy-saving and emissions reduction during "12th Five-Year". The conception of carbon footprint is the effective means of greenhouse gas emissions evaluation. However, due to the universal guidance, the diversity of textile and apparel products, the complexity of manuacturing and other characteristics, several issues need to be discussed when calculating the industrial carbon footprint of textile and apparel products, including the issues that are carbon emission factors and calculation methodolodgy of energy and materials are not unified and the impact assessment is absent. Based on this, this paper summarizes the progress in research on carbon footprint of textile and apparel products, then sums up several crucial issues of textile and apparel products in industrial carbon footprint calculation, and focuses on the construction of calculation methodolodgy of energy, materials carbon emission factors evaluation and impact assessment.For the emission factors issues, based on the PAS2050and LCA, further discussion has been made to clarify the calculation methodolodgy of energy and materials emission factors for products carbon footprint from the aspects of the emissions source, the system boundary, calculation model, and methodolodgy of data collection. By means of case study, a set of commonly used energy and materials emission factors for carbon footprint of textile and apparel products have been obtained. And according to the source of uncertainty analysis, the data quality index and the Monte Carol methodolodgy are used in the quantification of data uncertainty. A corrected set of commonly used energy and materials emission factors for industrial carbon footprint of textile and apparel products have been obtained and interpreted. In addition, the results of empirical analysis show that the quantitative methodolodgy which combines the data quality index and the Monte Carlo methodology can accurately quantify the uncertainty of carbon footprint. The conculsion provides the theory and practice basis of future research on carbon footprint of uncertainty.For the impact assessment issue, after comprehensive review of products water footprint theory and industrial carbon footprint calculation methodology, the carbon stress indices on environment and economic development are selected to construct the comprehensive carbon stress index and quantify the impact of carbon emissions for the purpose of sustainable development. Then the comprehensive carbon stress index are introduced to the textile and apparel industrial carbon footprint calculation to construct the calculation methodology for the industrial carbon footprint of textile and apparel with impact assessment(1CFlA). And the temporal and spatial differences of each index are dicussed. Finally, the32s combed cotton yarn produced in Guangdong, Hebei Province are selected as a case study. Compared with PAS2050which is widely used in product carbon footprint calculation, the advantage of ICF1A is that its results link greenhouse gas emissions in the production manufacturing with its impacts of environment and economic development. And the results of ICFIA can be used to compare the industrial carbon footprint of different producing areas. In addition, ICFIA can completely evaluate the impacts of textile and apparel products industrial carbon footprint on environment, sustainable economic development of the regions. The results provide a scientific basis of establishing emissions reduction measures in order to maintain the sustainable development environment, economy with carbon emissions.