A systematic review of the life cycle environmental performance of cotton textile products

The production of cotton textiles involves cotton cultivation, ginning, spinning, weaving, knitting, dyeing, finishing, cutting and sewing. It consumes large quantities of freshwater, energy and chemicals, causing serious environmental impacts. The environmental impacts of cotton textiles have been studied extensively through various methods. However, little literature comprehensively summarizes current status of researches on environmental impact of cotton clothing comprehensively and identifies common problems to further study. To fill this gap, this study collates published results on the environmental performance of cotton clothing based on different environmental impact assessment methods, i.e., life cycle assessment, carbon footprint, and water footprint. Apart from the environmental impact results, this study also discusses the key issues when assessing the environmental impact of cotton textiles, such as data collection, carbon storage, allocation methods, and the environment benefits brought by recycling. In the production process of cotton textile products, there will be other co-products with economic value so that the environmental impact should be allocated. The economic allocation method is the most widely used method in the existing researches. In the future, considerable efforts are required to construct the accounting modules which consist of multiple modules, each representing a production process of cotton clothing and including an inventory of inputs under that process, such as cotton cultivation (water, fertilizer, pesticides), and spinning (electricity). It can ultimately be used to flexibly invoke one or more modules to calculate the environmental impact of cotton textiles. Moreover, returning carbonized cotton straw to the field can retain about 50 % of carbon, thus having a certain potential for carbon sequestration.