Use, durability and end-of-life complete the garment account

Once a garment passes through distribution and retail into a wardrobe, its ongoing carbon footprint is governed by the frequency and thermal intensity of care.[S12] [S30] Unlike upstream spinning, knitting, dyeing and sewing, where energy consumption occurs in concentrated industrial facilities over days or weeks, use-phase emissions accumulate incrementally across dozens of domestic washing, drying and ironing cycles spread over years.[S08] [S12] The relative weight of this post-purchase stage in a cradle-to-grave inventory is substantial, yet it varies across regional models, garment types and baseline years.[S12] [S22] [S30]

Two institutional syntheses illustrate why analysts must never treat the use-phase share as a fixed universal constant.[S12] [S30] In one life cycle assessment carried out on behalf of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) with a baseline year of 2016, the use phase was considered responsible for 24 percent of the global fashion sector's greenhouse gas emissions, leaving 76 percent across raw material extraction, processing, assembly, logistics and disposal.[S12] By contrast, the European Environment Agency (EEA) consumption model published in 2022 attributes about 80 percent of the total climate change impact of textiles consumed in Europe to the production phase, 3 percent to distribution and retail, 14 percent to the use phase and 3 percent to end-of-life management.[S30]

The 10 percentage point difference between the 24 percent use-phase share in the 2016 UNEP sector baseline and the 14 percent share in the 2022 EEA European consumption model reflects genuine physical and methodological differences rather than an accounting error.[S12] [S22] [S30] First, the European consumption basket includes imported clothing produced in manufacturing hubs where coal-heavy electricity grids and thermal boilers elevate the absolute production burden, compressing the relative share of downstream care conducted on cleaner European grids.[S14] [S30] [S31] Second, aggregating all textile categories into one sector share blends items washed after almost every wear, such as cotton T-shirts and work shirts, with items washed rarely, such as wool coats and household furnishings.[S26] [S30] Exhibit 41 contrasts these two reference profiles to show why every garment study must state the underlying model geography, product mix and year before quoting a stage percentage.[S12] [S30]

While Exhibit 41 confirms that upstream production carries the majority of sector-wide climate impacts in both assessments, a 14 percent to 24 percent downstream share is large enough to reverse the ranking of two garments whose factory footprints lie within a narrow margin.[S12] [S30] [S31] Moreover, the chart cannot establish the use-phase share of any specific garment style without disaggregating the physical mechanics of laundering.[S22] [S26]

9.2 Washing, drying and ironing require explicit physical parameters

In an activity-based inventory built under ISO 14040, ISO 14044 and ISO 14067, consumer care is not modelled by multiplying cradle-to-gate emissions by an arbitrary markup.[S05] [S24] [S25] Instead, the practitioner links the functional unit to six observable or scenario-defined parameters: total wears over the garment's service life, wears before each wash cycle, wash water temperature and machine load efficiency, detergent mass and formulation, the fraction of wash loads dried in a mechanical tumble dryer versus ambient air, and the duration of electric ironing.[S12] [S20] [S26] [S30]

Each parameter acts on a distinct energy or chemical vector.[S20] [S30] Heating water to 40 degrees Celsius or 60 degrees Celsius dominates washing machine electricity demand, whereas cold-water cycles at 20 degrees Celsius to 30 degrees Celsius require power primarily for drum rotation and pumping.[S12] [S30] Mechanical tumble drying often consumes more electricity per kilogram of damp cotton fabric than washing because evaporating retained moisture requires substantial latent heat, whereas line drying in ambient air reduces drying energy to zero.[S12] [S30] Ironing adds an electrical load that scales with crease retention, and every kilowatt-hour of appliance electricity is multiplied by the dated location-based grid emission factor of the region where the garment is worn, supplemented by upstream fuel-cycle and transmission loss factors where required.[S14] [S20] [S31]

Geography therefore exerts as much influence over the use phase as it does over spinning and dyeing.[S14] [S31] A cotton garment worn in a household that washes at 40 degrees Celsius and uses an electric tumble dryer on a fossil-fuelled grid accumulates a heavy post-gate burden.[S12] [S14] The identical garment worn in Cameroon, where 54 percent of the population has access to electricity while consumption remains low, hydropower and solar expansion shape the grid mix, and solar line drying in ambient air is standard practice, generates a fraction of that use-phase footprint.[S09] [S28] With Cameroon clothing and footwear expenditure estimated at about US$94.70 per person and about 8.0 pieces per person in 2024 in the inherited evidence base, a domestic garment footprint calculated using imported European tumble-drying defaults would systematically misstate local post-gate emissions.[R26] [S16] [S22]