diego's blog

What is the Carbon Footprint of my wardrobe?

I have been an avid minimalist for the last few years and have been dressing in "uniform" for the past three. My uniform comprises blue chinos, white T-shirts, and usually white sneakers.

Since its inception, I have changed brands and fabrics, but the style has remained the same; I look the same from a distance, albeit I'm a bit older now.

I love my uniform and would advocate for it any day, but with anything, there are downsides. One of the things that upsets me the most is that I need to change all my clothes once a year. I usually have eight T-shirts and one pair of pants, and they inevitably wear out. The same goes for shoes.

This has led me to buy new clothing every year, which is not great from an environmental perspective. Or is it? Several questions have bugged me for the last few months. On the one hand, there is the question about brands: Does it matter if I buy a t-shirt from H&M versus All-Birds (looking at the carbon footprint alone)? Should I be spending $30+ on every t-shirt?

On the other hand, I have been considering buying all my clothes secondhand. This would mean that I would need to break my uniform since it's almost impossible to find plain T-shirts (let alone white) that are second-hand and in good condition.

I have already started buying secondhand clothes, but I never took the time to answer the question: Does it matter? Where do emissions come from when it comes to cloth, and how much of my carbon footprint does it represent?

With my newly discovered mindset of planning before jumping into a new project, it made sense to check if spending time improving how I shop for clothes had any MEANINGFUL impact on MY PERSONAL footprint. I'm adding caps to emphasize that this is a personal calculation and that you should NOT extrapolate and make decisions based on my numbers alone.

Disclaimer: Before we start, I will play quickly and lose with numbers throughout this post. This is not because the numbers are not important; they are. I'm doing this analysis to make better decisions, and I will probably need to have noticeable differences to change how I behave.

My Carbon Footprint ðŸ‘Ģ #

TL;DR: it's bad.

I used a few carbon calculators and got roughly the same results: ~8.5 tons of CO2e. For comparison, the average worldwide is 4.79, and the average in Europe is 6.8.

Let's look at the breakdown:

At 0.3, clothes contribute to ~3.5% of my annual emissions, much less than I had imagined. This is largely because of the disproportionate emissions I am responsible for when flying.

Even before discussing the particular emissions of each piece of clothing, I can already tell that spending hours online to find the perfect second-hand pair of shoes would not "be worth it." Clearly, I need to spend more time thinking about my flying and less on clothes.

For the sake of simplicity, I will look into the following categories:

The emissions of all these items can be categorized as follows. First, we have the emissions associated with the raw materials and their production. This would be the emissions required to produce 1kg of cotton, linen, etc.

Then we have transportation emissions: these are the emissions associated with moving things around: raw materials to the factory, factory (probably overseas) to the warehouse, warehouse to store, home delivery, etc.

We have emissions associated with manufacturing a product: literally, the energy used to power the sewing and cutting machines.

We have the emissions of using cloths: this is the energy and water used to power a washing machine each time a cloth is used. If an item would be tumble-dried, then we would also include that. This is why items worn several times without washing might do better in comparison.

Finally, we have end-of-life disposal and emissions associated with degradation in a landfill.

There are other factors as well that might influence my decision here, and I will look at them on a later occasion:

Just as a reference, so that we might briefly look into water usage, a typical American shower uses 60L of fresh water. Assuming I shower daily, we have a yearly baseline of ~22000L water consumption.

Carbon Footprint by Clothing Category 👚 #

These numbers are very much approximated since performing LCA analysis is complex. Furthermore, limited information is available online, and not all is consistent. Remember that the numbers might be off by a few kilograms here and there.

T-Shirts 👚 #

If found, at least 3 or 4 references online pointing to the carbon footprint of a t-shirt. The data points I found consisted of 5kg, 10kg, 15kg, and 20.5 kg of CO2e. Notice how we talked about tons before, and now we are talking about kilograms.

These numbers are quite different, with the larger being 4x the smallest. Even then, we can use the mean of ~12.5kg of CO2e for t-shirts as a reference for further analysis.

These numbers INCLUDE the electricity used to wash and dry the items.

The next question we should ask is what percentage of the total emissions are generated before we buy the product (upstream), how much during usage, and how much during disposal. This is relevant because we can "eliminate" upstream emissions but not "usage" emissions when buying second-hand clothes.

Again, the number varies depending on the source, but it looks like 60%-80% of the overall emissions are generated upstream. Let's use 70% as a rule of thumb.

Let's look at my numbers if I changed all the t-shirts in my uniform yearly: 10 x 12.5 = 125 kg of CO2e, or 0.125 tons of CO2e.

If I could and were to buy second-hand, the math would be 10 x 12.5 x 0.3, 37.5 kg of CO2e, or 0.0375 tons of CO2e.

Jeans 👖 #

Thankfully, a report by Levi's, linked below, is quite thorough and allows us to estimate emissions for a pair of jeans.

Cotton jeans emit about 34 kg of CO2e over their lifespan, 60% of which is emitted at manufacturing, 37% during usage, and 3% at disposal.

The report also includes good practices to reduce usage emissions, such as washing less often, using a cold cycle, and air drying.

If I were to buy second-hand, the associated emissions would be 13.6 kg of CO2.

Since we are at it, we can look at the water associated with manufacturing a new pair of jeans: 2500L. That number looks quite large when we think we drink ~600L annually (2L daily). Yet, if we remember the amount we spend showering (22000L), we can see that this represents 11% of that total. It is still quite a large number for a single piece.

Running Shoes 👟 #

I found some data showing that shoes are around 14kg of CO2. According to AllBirds, their Men's Tree Runer Go uses only 4.89 kg of CO2, much less than other similar shoes on the internet.

Unlike other items in this list, shoes are barely washed; if they are, they do not use a washing machine. Consequently, we might assume that the emissions associated with their use are almost zero.

According to my estimations, owning one pair of sneakers and going through them (literally destroying them) over the course of a year seems reasonable. I would probably count about ~10kg of CO2 due to shoes.

Sanity-check ðŸĪŠ #

A very good practice when using estimates is using a bottom-up/top-down approach and comparing the results. If they are similar, then it's a good indication that the method is consistent (although it proves nothing).

My carbon footprint calculator estimates about 300kg of CO2e for clothes. I get an approximate total of ~200kg using the above numbers. Considering that I might need to replace an additional item a year, such as a jacket, the result is close!

We can sleep better knowing our analysis is not completely off.

Conclusion #

As always, do your best to live a sustainable life. There is no reason not to.

At the same time, if I need to select an area of my life that needs improvement, I tend to travel, not my white T-shirts.

If I had to guess how I will use this information, I would say that:

References #

I like this report by Levi's; it is quite clear.