Does sufficiency ensure sustainability? Applying sufficiency lifestyles allocation in absolute environmental sustainability assessment of textile fibers

Abstract The textile industry creates an environmental burden because of its extensive energy, material, and water use and increasing consumer consumption. While life cycle assessments of the products unravel these impacts, they are rarely put into perspective through comparisons with environmental thresholds. This study applies the absolute environmental sustainability assessment (AESA) method to evaluate the environmental impacts of the three most common (by production volume) textile fibers, namely viscose, cotton, and polyester, against environmental carrying capacities. The allocation of carrying capacities to one tonne of textile fiber was done with the two frequently applied sharing principles of grandfathering and economic value and two novel principles based on sufficiency lifestyles. The impacts of one tonne of each fiber type were calculated using the Environmental Footprint 3.1 method with ecoinvent 3.10 data and SimaPro 9.6.0.1 software. The results indicated that none of the examined fibers are environmentally sustainable in absolute terms, as the environmental impacts exceed the carrying capacities defined by the sharing principles in the impact categories of climate change, freshwater eutrophication, and particulate matter. Depending on the fiber type and sharing principle, climate impacts need to be reduced by 65.8–88.5%, freshwater eutrophication impacts by 6.3–88.5%, and particulate matter impacts by 61.1–93.0%. The results indicate the need for actions related to both supply and consumption to improve production processes and reduce the aggregate consumption of fibers. Future research could further develop the sufficiency lifestyles sharing principle to recognize overconsumption.