Cradle to Gate Environmental Impact Assessment of Fire Retardant Coverall Manufacturing in Pakistan

The environmental footprints of textile industries in Pakistan are quite significant in terms of natural resource utilization, releasing greenhouse gas emissions, damaging the ecosystem, and causing adverse water pollution. This study aimed at understanding and quantifying the upstream life cycle assessment of a textile product (Fire – Retardant coverall) manufactured in the Pakistan textile industry. The data was collected and analyzed using a sustainability assessment tool - OpenLCA with using Eco-Invent v3.8 Cutoff database for secondary data for evaluating environmental impacts from the Cradle-to-Gate Life Cycle Assessment boundary. Results for this study indicating that the most significant impact occurred at the Agricultural Land Occupation stage (manufacturing phase 15 m ² a). The highest water footprint of manufactured products occurs at the raw-material processing stage (21.18 m ³ ). The climate change impacts in terms of greenhouse gas emissions were determined to be highest at raw-material processing and extraction stages (30.27 kg CO ₂ e and 28.29 kg CO ₂ e respectively). The highest freshwater ecotoxicity occurred at the raw-material extraction stage during the manufacturing of the Fire-Retardant product (20.14 kg 1,4-DCB-Eq). Human toxicity occurred manufacturing and processing phase for the Fire-Retardant product had similar values (9.45 kg 1,4-DCB-Eq and 9.51 kg 1,4-DCB-Eq correspondingly). It suggested here that employing modern efficient technologies, innovative agricultural practices and switching of transport fuel types such as from fossil fuels to renewable energy will reduce disastrous environment impacts of Fire-Retardant coverall manufacturing on environment.