In 2024, the Global Fashion Summit, the largest event in sustainable fashion globally, celebrates its 15th anniversary. The urgent plea for transparency in fashion is more critical than ever, driven by upcoming legislation like the Digital Product Passport, due by the end of 2025, and the Green Claims Directive, aimed at preventing greenwashing.
Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) offer a transparent depiction of the environmental performance of a product or material due to their international standardization, third-party verification, and public availability. To create an EPD, a product category rule (PCR) must be followed, providing guidelines for environmental calculations. Currently, there are about sixteen PCRs related to the fashion system at EPD International, covering the production of finished fabrics and the manufacturing of apparel items.
Despite the availability of these rules, EPDs remain less popular in the fashion industry compared to other types of declarations. While EPDs are preferred in industries like construction and electronics, fashion tends to favor Product Environmental Footprints (PEFs). PEFs differ from EPDs in two major ways: they lack a program operator, which entails the unavailability of a centralized system to create guidelines, publish, and manage declarations, and use single score results. This score depicts environmental performance as one number that summarizes all impact categories of a life cycle analysis. It should be, therefore, used cautiously, as it involves subjective weighting by specialists.
Why, then, are PEFs so popular in fashion? The answer is straightforward: the European Union created and highly recommends the PEF method for compliance with legislation. Despite their rising popularity, the most common practice in fashion remains the use of Type I environmental declarations, or eco-labels. Eco-labels, like the Nordic Swan, operate through voluntary programs and assign a badge to products based on criteria established by the label program. Unlike EPDs, eco-labels highlight the potential advantages of a product over competitors, assigning a preferability aspect to it. There are approximately 500 eco-labels worldwide, with roughly half related to fashion goods.
Data availability and quality pose significant challenges for transparency in fashion. Complex supply chains, involving numerous actors globally, make data tracking and sharing prone to mistakes and information loss. This complexity affects the calculation of a fashion product’s environmental performance and the accountability of the manufacturer.
Despite the lack of harmonization on which methodology to adopt or how to manage the overwhelming amount of data, change must be pursued. Tools like those provided by LCA.no can automate the process and ensure data quality through internal verification procedures. By improving the accuracy and transparency of environmental data, these tools can support the fashion industry’s efforts to comply with emerging regulations and meet the growing demand for sustainable practices. Ultimately, leveraging advanced data management and verification tools is a critical step toward achieving greater transparency and, thus, sustainability in the fashion industry.
Pedro Ferreira
LCA Specialist