Low Carbon and Clean Design for Garment Industry Based on Environmental Footprint Accounting

Due to its long industrial chain and wide variety of commodities, the garment industry with high carbon emissions and high pollution cannot effectively achieve low-carbon and clean production by upgrading a specific technology. Considering that the impact of the garment industry on the environment is mainly carbon emission, wastewater pollution and chemical pollution, this paper analyzes and lists three kinds of environmental footprints that should be considered most by the garment industry from the perspective of environmental footprint, namely, carbon footprint, water footprint and chemical footprint, and gives the calculation models of the three kinds of footprints. Finally, this paper takes carbon footprint as an example to analyze the carbon footprint of Xiangyun yarn fabric, linen fabric and worsted wool fabric, and gives some suggestions on the low-carbon upgrading of the garment industry. The results show that the worsted fabric has the highest carbon footprint, 24.809 kgCO(2)e/kg, and its spinning process and post-treatment process are the two processes with the largest carbon footprint, accounting for 70.6% of the total carbon emissions. This means that for the worsted wool fabric, the improvements of spinning and post-treatment related processes can greatly reduce the level of carbon emissions in the production process and contribute to the low-carbon upgrading of the garment industry.