As print customers increasingly seek to improve their environmental footprint and their company’s social responsibility, appropriate information can be gathered from other sectors’ sustainability efforts. Findings from a Life Cycle Assessment of cellulosic fibres, commissioned by Stella McCartney gives valuable insights for the printing sector. Similar to paper, manmade cellulosic fibres (MMCF) such as viscose, rayon and trademarked fabrics such as Tencel are derived from forests.
Style gurus are also looking at sustainability issues. Many of the world’s most recognized brands, including Levi’s, H&M, Wrangler and The Gap have turned their attention to ensuring their viscose fabrics, including, their packaging and printed materials, do not originate from the world’s forests.
Today, 105 fashion brands have signed policies with not-for-profit Canopy, committing to eliminate any sourcing from the world’s endangered forests and help catalyse the production of next generation solutions. Fashion brand Stella McCartney is one such that is fully committed to sustainability and to that end, commissioned SCS Global Services to undertake a truly ground breaking Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of the impact of sourcing MMCF.
The study compared the environmental performance of ten different raw material sources of manmade cellulosic fibres, examining a range of environmental issues from fibre derived from forests and agricultural operations right through to the production of viscose/rayon or their equivalents made with flax.
While focused on the production of cellulosic fibre for clothing, LCAs findings are worthy of evaluation as the results revealed the impacts of extraction across a wide range of forest ecosystems. Pulp derived from Indonesian rainforests, Indonesian plantations and Canada’s Boreal Forests registered the heaviest environmental footprints. In contrast Belgian Flax and recycled textile pulps presented favourably across the majority of the performance categories.
