Life Cycle Assessments on your Footwear Range – Popular Questions and Answers
Over the past 18 months, we have had lots of questions from Brands, Retailers and Manufacturers around life cycle assessments particularly on their footwear range. Here are some popular questions we have received with our answers. If you have any other questions, please email [email protected] and our experts would be happy to help.
- How do I do a life cycle assessment for my footwear?
A footwear life cycle assessment is a complex undertaking that requires a lot of detailed information to be collected at all stages of the footwear material’s production and the final footwear manufacturing site, along with information on logistics and distribution as well as the final consumer use levels. To do a life cycle assessment for footwear, it is necessary to identify the supply chain from raw material extraction to final post-consumer product disposal and collect data at each point. Commercial software and/or the use of expert consultants can help convert this data into environmental impact criteria such as Carbon Footprint (Greenhouse Gases), Land Usage and Water Usage.
Eurofins | BLC have developed a Footwear Calculator based on a life cycle assessment approach. The tool allows users to profile footwear and understand potential impacts from individual materials and component, manufacturing and retail locations, retail channels and level of customer use. A simple to use and cost-effective tool, it produces assessments in minutes identifying potential hotspots and key sustainability target areas.
Click here to access more on our Footwear Impact Calculator.
- What should be included in a footwear life cycle assessment?
A life cycle assessment requires consideration of all inputs and outputs in a footwear’s entire supply chain from raw material extraction to final post-consumer waste disposal. Examples of inputs in a life cycle include all footwear materials, water used during material processing, energy for material and footwear production as well as energy for transport, warehousing and retail, and land usage equivalents for all stages. Examples of outputs include the footwear product, wastewater, airborne emissions and solid waste.
- What are the sustainability risks for footwear?
The manufacturing of footwear is a labour-intensive industry that uses a high number of components and a wide variety of materials which are sourced from all over the world. As such, the entire life cycle of a footwear product from all the individual raw materials (cradle) through component and shoe production, consumer use and end-of-life (grave), has a significant impact on the environment in terms of carbon footprint, land use, water usage and much more.
- How to assess the sustainability performance of my footwear?
A life cycle assessment is a comprehensive and appropriate approach to assess the sustainability performance of footwear. As these can be very costly and time-consuming, there are commercial tools that use life cycle assessment principles and respected secondary data to estimate sustainability impacts. An example of such a tool is Eurofins | BLC Footwear Impact Calculator. A simple to use and cost-effective tool which allows users to identify hotspots and sustainability areas enabling brands, retailers, and sustainability managers to assess sustainability impacts for their footwear range. Click here to find out more.
26 May 2023