Design and development of a life cycle model for the production of denim fabrics in small and medium enterprises: the case of FashionArt

Attention to sustainability is an increasingly important issue in the perspective of business and product development. There is a greater tendency toward environmentally conscious development that can preserve the environment. To assess the impacts of a product, activity or service, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is used, which allows the entire life cycle to be analysed from the perspective of eco-design. This methodology is standardized by a series of international standards ISO 14040-44 and consists of four phases (goal and scope definition, life cycle inventory analysis, impact assessments and interpretation of results) among which the most important one is the second one which is called Life Cycle Inventory (LCI). LCI is very complex phase and complexity lies in several factors: first and foremost, the great expenditure of energy, time, and resources that it requires, and secondly, the involvement of specialists who are capable of conducting the analysis. Another important point is the close collaboration between specialists and staff in order to collect the primary data in the most efficient and reality-compliant manner possible. The LCA analysis under consideration was carried out on denim products and was conducted in collaboration with Fashion Art, a leading company in the field of high fashion denim garment design. The starting point of this master's thesis project was to monitor the production process from raw materials to the finished product including all the companies involved mainly small and medium sized enterprises. The second step was the collection of data, then the LCI phase followed by the processing of the results obtained through the use of the SimaPro software. The inventory phase is the most articulated of the four phases that make up LCA as it involves the collection of all data relating to process inputs and outputs. In the case of Fashion Art, the difficulties are related to the fact that the representative sample is composed of small-sized companies in which the traceability of consumption data is complex and it is generally only possible to obtain plant data, not punctual data per product item. Another difficulty is the fact that commercially available databases such as Ecoinvent 3.9 do not contain specific information for the fashion sector. To overcome these problems, a specific inventory was modelled for the company, starting where possible from what was available in the databases and where not possible through the collection of primary data in the company, subsequently modelled in the SimaPro software to obtain the impacts. In this way, it was possible to resolve the difficulties and obtain a model of the impacts. Finally, an eco-design tool was designed to monitor the production and design of garments by means of a dynamic LCA model, with the aim of assessing and improving the impact on the environment.