Calculating the environmental impact of a garment: the method to understand (and reduce) the environmental footprint of your clothes

If you can't be bothered to read it all

• 👕 The impact of a garment is calculated from raw material production to the product's end-of-life, including manufacturing, transport, and usage. This is called a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA).
• 📊 Europe has defined 16 common indicators, gathered under the name PEF, to evaluate climate change, water consumption, and fossil resource depletion, among others. No material is perfect; each has its weaknesses.
• 🧮 In France, the public tool Ecobalyse allows for a score to be calculated based on a few key data points regarding the product and its manufacturing.
• ⏳ The calculation is based on days of wear, so a garment worn for a long time has a much lower daily impact than a fast-fashion item quickly discarded.
• 🇪🇺 The European Union is preparing an increasingly strict regulatory arsenal, ranging from digital product passports to the regulation of greenwashing, which will make this calculation unavoidable, including in Belgium.
• 🌱 Reducing a garment’s impact primarily involves eco-design, shorter production chains, extended product lifespan, and the choice of serious certifications.

What is the impact of a garment?

A garment’s impact is the set of environmental consequences it generates from its very first stage to its end-of-life. It starts with cotton farming or oil extraction for polyester, and it ends with recycling, incineration, or landfill. It can be measured using a well-established method: Life Cycle Assessment (or LCA).

Generally, a garment goes through eight major stages before ending up in your wardrobe: extraction of raw materials, spinning and weaving, finishing (dyeing, treatment), manufacturing, distribution, transport, consumer usage, and finally, end-of-life management. Each of these stages consumes resources and generates waste that weighs on the climate, biodiversity, environmental health, and resource depletion.

The problem is that two materials can have a completely different impact depending on the angle from which you look. A 2026 study comparing cotton and polyester t-shirts in a fast-fashion context shows that cotton carries more weight in land use and water consumption, while polyester stands out primarily for its impact on climate change and the consumption of fossil resources, in addition to several toxicity indicators.

What are the environmental impact indicators?

To prevent each brand from inventing its own method, the European Union has defined a common framework, the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF), which groups 16 mandatory indicators: climate change, water consumption, fossil resource depletion, eutrophication, human toxicity, and ecotoxicity, among others. Cotton puts the most pressure on water and land, while polyester weighs on the climate and fossil resources.

Specifically for the textile sector, ADEME has added three supplements to these 16 basic indicators. The first concerns exports outside of Europe; a portion of clothing ends up as offshored waste, often in countries where waste management is poorly controlled, which can lead to underestimating the real environmental and health risks. The second focuses on microfibers, whose release into the environment, particularly through washing, is evaluated according to their persistence and biodegradability. The third is a durability coefficient that rewards garments designed to last, both physically (resistance) and emotionally (attachment, repairability, breadth of range offered by the brand).

How is the impact of a garment calculated?

In France, the calculation relies on a public tool, Ecobalyse, developed by ADEME and the Ministry of Ecological Transition. Based on four mandatory pieces of data (product category, mass, raw materials, location of manufacturing stages), it takes into account several impact categories to produce an overall score, the environmental cost, which companies can then declare on a dedicated portal.

At Lucid, we rely on this same tool to calculate the impact of our own products. Using open-source data from ADEME, we record the carbon footprint, water and fossil energy consumption, and number of kilometers traveled for each garment, from fiber to finished product. We then compare these figures to those of an equivalent garment—same cut, same weight—but made with the materials and production chain most common for this type of product, such as an Indian cotton t-shirt manufactured in China. This gives us a quantified basis for comparison, even though the calculations are purely theoretical.

→ Our full detailed methodology

At the European level, it is the PEFCR methodology for apparel that acts as the harmonizing force. Rather than reasoning by garment, it reasons by day of wear, meaning a long-worn garment has its impact spread over more uses, unlike a fast-fashion piece worn briefly and then thrown away.

What are the regulations and laws in Belgium / Europe?

The regulatory framework is currently under construction and is moving toward greater transparency. Since 2021, the European Commission has recommended using the PEF method to measure and communicate environmental impacts, a direction adopted in the 2022 Circular Economy Package: mandatory eco-design, digital product passports tracing composition and impact, and stricter control of "eco-friendly" claims. The European battery regulation, which already imposes this calculation via the PEF method, shows that this type of requirement is becoming stricter, and textiles are following the same trajectory.

In Belgium, as elsewhere in Europe, these texts will apply directly once adopted, and the country is closely following the work being done on the French side regarding Ecobalyse.

How can the impact of a garment be reduced?

• Eco-design from the start is the most decisive factor. Choosing low-impact materials rather than the cheapest ones, limiting the number of different components to facilitate recycling, reducing chemical finishing treatments, and designing repairable garments rather than disposable ones.
• Shorter production chains. Transport weighs heavily in the overall balance, especially when manufacturing stages are spread across several continents before the garment reaches the shop. Reducing the kilometers traveled between weaving, dyeing, and manufacturing, or limiting the use of air freight, has a direct effect on the carbon footprint.

  → We talk about this in more detail in this article on relocation

• An extended product lifespan. Since impact is calculated per day of wear, wearing a garment longer mechanically reduces its daily footprint, provided you focus on the quality of finishes, repairability, and a design that doesn't go out of style too quickly.
• Reduced water and fossil resource consumption at the source, via fibers requiring less irrigation, dyeing processes that are more water-efficient, or the integration of recycled materials that avoid the extraction of new, virgin resources.
• Serious certifications, such as GOTS for organic cotton or OEKO-TEX for the absence of harmful substances. These are based on verified specifications that ensure rigorous control of environmental and health impacts, particularly for the people wearing the garment daily.

  → Our article dedicated to existing textile labels

• Recycling and lengthening the life cycle, knowing that reuse remains generally more beneficial than recycling, even if both reduce the impact compared to incineration or landfilling, provided that recycled materials actually replace new production.

Conclusion

Calculating the impact of a garment allows us to move beyond vague discourse on responsible fashion into what is factual, measurable, and comparable. Understanding what lies behind a t-shirt—the water it consumed, the CO2 it emitted, the kilometers it traveled before ending up on a hanger—changes how we buy and how we produce.

This logic of transparency drives us forward daily: knowing the origin of our materials, limiting unnecessarily offshored production stages, and prioritizing partners capable of documenting their impacts rather than hiding behind vague eco-labels. This foundational work, still too rare in the industry, remains in our view the only real basis for building a more sober and honest fashion industry.