Methodology

At bAwear, we understand that businesses need practical and scalable solutions to assess their environmental impact. Our streamlined LCA approach respects the essential aspects of a traditional LCA while offering the speed and efficiency that companies need. By focusing on key elements, we can provide impact calculations that offer valuable insights into environmental hotspots within a supply chain. Our approach enables companies to assess the impact of multiple products, allowing for a more comprehensive view of their sustainability landscape. This broader perspective helps businesses make informed decisions and take meaningful action to reduce their environmental footprint.

The bAwear Calculator uses the ReCiPe 2016 midpoint (Hierarchist) methodology. The reported environmental impact indicators are ‘Climate change’ (referred to as ‘Global warming’),  Fossil Resource Scarcity (Energy use’ in this tool), and ‘Water use", and 'Land use'.

The results of your calculations can be used for understanding the environmental impact of your textile supply chain and provide insights to make better, data-driven decisions to drive sustainable product design and/or sourcing.

Overall, streamlined LCAs aim to provide a rapid and cost-effective way to assess the environmental impacts of products or systems while still maintaining a reasonable level of accuracy and reliability. By simplifying data collection, modelling, and analysis techniques, they make LCA more accessible to a broader range of users and applications. However, it's important to recognize that the level of detail and accuracy achieved in a streamlined LCA may not be sufficient for all purposes, and careful consideration should be given to the appropriateness of the approach for a given application.

Overall, while streamlined LCAs can provide valuable insights and facilitate decision-making, their reliability hinges on careful consideration of scope, data quality, methodological rigor, and validation processes. It's essential to assess the suitability of a streamlined LCA approach for a specific application and to interpret the results with an understanding of its limitations and uncertainties.

The Product Environmental Footprint Category Rules (PEF-CR) are currently under construction and not formalized, therefore there is no solution which can be PEF-CR compliant.

bAwear does not calculate chemical toxicity because the composition and behaviour of chemicals used in textile processes are largely unknown and highly variable. Chemicals in formulations are often not fully disclosed, and their reactions and transformations during processing are complex and unpredictable. Safety Data Sheets (SDS) are frequently incomplete, making it difficult to assess toxicity accurately. Additionally, eco-toxicity models require known chemical structures, which are not always available. Consequently, bAwear believes that any toxicity impact calculations would be unreliable, and potentially misleading by a factor of 10-100 times, and thus prefers not to report these impact categories.

"Powered by SimaPro" means that bAwear utilizes SimaPro's calculation engine and LCA expertise to provide credible sustainability metrics for textiles. Together, we combine over 30 years of textile sustainability and LCA experience.