Mid Sweden University

In recent years, the growing textile industry along with an increasing consumption have exerted great pressure on the environment. Many companies and consumers are aware of this issue and work on reducing their environmental impact, which requires knowledge about harmful production processes. One holistic tool to identify these is Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), which analyzes a product’s entire impact from raw material extraction to disposal. Woolpower is an example of a company that wants to reduce their environmental impact with the help of an LCA with the aim of identifying the environmental impacts in the life cycle of a wool base layer garment as a point of measurement for future improvements.The inputs and outputs for the entire life cycle of the garment were collected from Woolpower and their material suppliers as well as from literature. A base scenario was modeled and analyzed in the software SimaPro with the impact assessment methods ReCiPe 2016 (H) midpoint and ReCiPe 2016 (H) endpoint. In addition to the base scenario, differences in the use phase and transports were analyzed as test scenarios, which were used to answer the research questions of ‘Which improvements can be made in order to decrease negative environmental impacts?’ and ‘How does a longer use phase of the garment influence the total environmental impact?’.Results showed that the whole life cycle of the crewneck emits 10,3kg CO2 eq. The crewneck assembly had the highest impact in most impact categories and the sheep fleece was the highest contributing factor. According to normalization values, the crewneck’s life cycle has the highest impact on Marine ecotoxicity and Freshwater ecotoxicity. The overall environmental impact can be strongly influenced by the use phase, which was shown by an increase of 0,6kg CO2 eq emissions by doubling the life time of the garment.Improvements that could be made in the life cycle of the crewneck are prolonging the life time, decreasing washing and drying cycles, using an energy source with lower impact, looking at alternative disposal methods for the packaging box (e.g. recycling), and decreasing transports of low load capacity vehicles.More research should be done on the data gaps that emerged in this study in order to be able to reduce potential impacts from the garment production stage as well as from transports.