Dive Brief:
- The apparel industry has only marginally reduced its carbon use in recent years, meaning it’s not decarbonizing at the pace or scale to meet limit planetary warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, according to a report released earlier this year.
- A key barrier is the industry’s continued reliance on coal, which accounts for 31% of its energy consumption, per the report. Coal represents the largest Tier 2 supplier fuel source, which refers to the manufacturing of fabrics to be sewn into garments, accounting for 40% of the global energy mix.
- Although a growing number of facilities report purchasing or generating renewable energy, renewables account for only 2% of total industry energy consumption, and this stayed flat between 2023 and 2024, according to the report. However, switching from coal to renewables alone will not be enough to meet global climate targets, as major apparel-producing countries also have carbon-intensive electric grids, according to the report.
Dive Insight:
The report was produced by Cascale, previously known as the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, a collective of over 300 organizations in the apparel, footwear and textile industries that was originally founded in 2009 by Walmart and Patagonia. The report analyzes 2023 and 2024 energy data — the most recent available — from the Higg Facility Environmental Module, an environmental impact assessment tool, focusing on finished product manufacturing, or Tier 1, and material manufacturing, or Tier 2.
The analysis uses a new metric, the Effective Energy Carbon Intensity, reflecting the carbon intensity of a facility’s energy-related greenhouse gas emissions. “The core of the metric is the conversion of electrical energy consumed at a facility back into the equivalent amount of primary fossil fuel energy that it takes to generate that electricity,” the report’s authors wrote. The conversion allows for direct comparisons of thermal and electrical energy sources, according to the report.
The report focused on facilities in major producing countries, including China, India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Turkey, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. In China, Turkey and Vietnam, facility emissions intensity could be plotted on a bell curve, meaning that most facilities cluster near the average emissions intensity. But in India, Sri Lanka and Pakistan, emissions intensity varies so widely that the graph looks flat, meaning the national average says little about an individual facility’s emissions.
However, the report also found that even in countries where emissions fall on a bell curve, those emissions are highly concentrated in particular facilities. A relatively small number of large, energy-intensive facilities drove a disproportionate share of emissions across countries, meaning that identifying and focusing on these facilities has the potential to scale progress more quickly than focusing equally on all facilities, per the report.
Due to the wide variation in emissions among facilities, the report cautions against apparel companies merely relocating production based on country averages, which could be misleading. Instead, the report encourages long-term, collaborative engagement with manufacturers, particularly in Tier 2.
“This report makes clear that there are no shortcuts to decarbonization,” said Jeremy Lardeau, senior vice president of Higg Index at Cascale, in a press release. “Real progress depends on true value chain collaboration, not sourcing shifts by the brands. The level of investment required to achieve the deep decarbonization measures at facility level means brands will have to step up in a meaningful way.”
Cascale’s results are in line with a July 2025 assessment by global nonprofit the Apparel Impact Institute, which found that the apparel sector’s greenhouse gas emissions increased 7.5% between 2022 and 2023, the most recent years for which data were available. A United Nations assessment released in late 2025 found that global greenhouse gas emissions continue to grow, reaching a new record of 57.7 gigatons in 2024, a 2.3% increase from 2024.
