Calculations And Analysis On Embodied Carbon And Carbon Responsibility Of Sino-us Textile Products

The change of global economic and greenhouse gas emissions can be regarded as the most concerned issues nowadays. With a large amount of carbon emissions, China----the “world factory”---is now facing great pressure on reducing carbon emissions, especially the textile industry which is one of the pillar industries of China. The import and export trade of textile products has provided China large numbers of jobs and boosted the economic growth, and also consumes a lot of resources and seriously pollutes the environment.In recent years, the United States has exceeded Hongkong and become the largest export market of Chinese textile products. It’s very important to analyze the embodied carbon of textile products between China and US, which will help the industry to restructure, be energy-saving and form a low-carbon green path. It also plays an important role in identifying the carbon emission responsibility and claiming the carbon emissions transfer between China and US.This paper first analyses the current situation of Sino-US textile trade and its environmental behavior, and then use the input-output method to calculate and analyze the embodied carbon emissions in the period of 1995-2009. It separated the textile products into two parts, which are “textile” and “garment”, and discusses their behaviors separately. Finally, by calculating the “carbon emission by production” and “carbon emission by consumption” it identified the responsibilities between China and US, which leads to a further study on how the indicators influenced the export embodied carbon emission. The research shows that China exports carbon emissions of textile products to US and 80% of which are made by garment industry; China’s textile carbon emission by production is higher than the one by consumption, while the US has the opposite situation; if China’s textile export, energy consumption and consumption of chemistry industry for textile industry increase 1%, China’s textile carbon emission will increase 0.4%, 0.37% and 1.41%. China has been taken much responsibilities for the US on textile products.