The Fibre Assessment Landscape

The Textile Compass’s recent webinar asked, “In which direction should we be pointing?” Here’s what experts on fibre assessment tools had to say

The brand-new Textile Compass project (Textilkompassen/Tekstilkompasset) launched an exploration of the fibre assessment landscape, inviting experts on fiber assessment tools to a recent two-hour webinar.

How the impacts of textile fibres are assessed matters. These assessments shape our understanding of different materials. They also inform the choices made by industry, policymakers, public procurement and consumers.

Organisers asked attendees: how well do existing frameworks, such as LCA (life cycle assessment) and the EU’s Product Environmental Footprint Category Rules (PEFCR), reflect real-world impacts? As policy relies on these tools, how might it be steered?

The Findings

1.     Time is invisible in LCA

The clearest gap in LCA is time. Åsa Strandberg, who conceived the Textile Compass project after a career at H&M, said her own turning point came from comparing cotton and viscose.

Current methods take no account of how long a fibre takes to regenerate.

“Time changes the picture completely,” Strandberg said – and with it, the case for assessing any material in isolation, rather than part of a larger system.

2.     LCAs count only damage, never benefit

A second gap in LCA is the lack of a way to recognize a fibre’s positive contributions. Putting it plainly, LCA is “damage accounting,” said Dr Paul Swan, technical advisor to the International Wool Textile Organisation. LCA has no mechanism for crediting a material’s positive contributions. Soil health, carbon sequestration, biodegradability – all of these can only give a negative impact.

For wool and fibres like it, current LCAs show large imprints from carbon emissions and low land-use efficiency.  However, once nature’s own carbon cycle is brought into the equation, the results shift – and can shift substantially.

Meanwhile, LCA practice largely fails to distinguish between the contemporary carbon cycle and fossil-fuel based emissions.

3.     The model itself is a problem

Dr Swan offered as a “real test” for any material: can it degrade and return to the soil, or not? Ove Jackobsen, professor emeritus at Nord University, pushed the critique further. The flaws in LCA aren’t only technical, he said. They are also structural. Ecological economics questions assumptions that LCAs take for granted: growth, competition, and market allocation.

Rather than optimize scores within LCA, the very framework could be challenged.

These ideas were echoed by Federico Brugnoli of SPIN360. Working with leather LCAs, Brugnoli found that fossil-fuel byproducts are allocated impact based on energy output rather than material use. Meaning, fibre-formation impact for synthetics is, in practice, allocated almost nothing. SPIN360 is developing  a hybrid LCA model to close that gap.

Where to go from here

The Textile Compass closed the session with three open questions.

→ How can we compare materials without stripping away their context?

→  At the same time, how can we ensure comparable scrutiny across fundamentally different production systems (harmonization)?

→ And finally, how can assessment become more comprehensive without becoming unusably complex?

With the EU yet to weigh in decisively on several of these points, organizers said, there may be room for the project to help shape where the debate goes next.

About The Textile Compass

This newly initiated Interreg project, the Textile Compass (Textilkompassen/Tekstilkompasset) is co-financed by Interreg Sweden–Norway, Region Jämtland Härjedalen and Trøndelag County Council, with the cooperation of the Norwegian Nord University and Sweden’s Mitt University, and Fibershed Norway and IUC Jämtland Härjedalen.

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