As far as Joel Mertens, director of Higg Product Tools at Cascale, is concerned, the era of easy progress in industry-wide decarbonization is over.
“We’ve tackled a lot of the low-hanging fruit,” he said. “We’re at a time where what is needed to drive environmental progress is investment.”
But stop us if you’ve heard this one: Fashion—meaning apparel, footwear and textiles—isn’t doing nearly enough or moving fast enough to meet global climate targets. In fact, it’s doing the opposite: heading further off course from the carbon reduction trajectory necessary to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius because marginal improvements to material selections and production processes cannot keep pace with the increasing volume churn.
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Verified environmental data gleaned from seven of the largest production countries shows that the lion’s share of greenhouse gas emissions from apparel and footwear manufacturing comes from energy, yet coal consumption has remained stubbornly unchanged from 2023 to 2024, the multi-stakeholder organization formerly known as the Sustainable Apparel Coalition said in a new “state of the industry” report. In Tier 2 facilities that create and process textiles, coal accounts for 40 percent of the total energy use. And though a growing number of establishments are adopting renewable energy in most countries, these green alternatives never make up more than 4 percent of the total energy mix in either the first or second tiers.
In other words, news that coal power generation fell in China and India for the first time since the ‘70s in 2025, while no less a “historic” accomplishment, doesn’t negate the need for targeted action—particularly with the 1,500 manufacturing facilities in nine countries that Higg Facility Environmental Module data reveals are responsible for 80 percent of fashion’s carbon emissions due to energy-intensive wet processing such as laundering and dyeing.
“We do see a concentration of emissions in in larger facilities, and that represents an opportunity for the industry to be able to say, ‘OK, yes, we’re involved in thousands and thousands of facilities around the world, but when we start to look at the largest decarbonization option opportunities, we can start to focus our efforts on a smaller number of key facilities,’” Mertens said.
Cascale created a new metric, known as effective energy carbon intensity, or EECI, which divides total carbon emissions by total energy inputs but also weights electric and thermal energy quantities to offer what it said is a “more balanced perspective on electric and thermal carbon intensity.”
By focusing on a factory’s energy sources rather than how that energy is used, it added, the EECI offers an “at-a-glance understanding of overall decarbonization progress” in future iterations of the report. Depending on its score, a factory or region can be flagged as ranging from “almost fully dependent on high carbon fossil fuels” all the way to “energy is almost fully decarbonized.” At the same time, Mertens insisted, using the report to make country- or region-level sourcing decisions would “go against its intent.”
Take the EECI values for China, Turkey and Vietnam, which are “reasonably normally distributed” in a bell-curve shape, for instance. While those of India, Sri Lanka and Pakistan appear “flat“ in comparison, the numbers suggest greater variability in individual facility performance and fewer factories achieving the average performance.
More significant are the thermal and electric portions of the metric, which can indicate what is stoking EECI performance. In China, Turkey and Pakistan, electric carbon intensity is lower than the EECI in both Tiers 1 and 2, signaling that the countries’ factories are decreasing their greenhouse gas emission intensity by electrifying their energy use.
“It shouldn’t be like, ‘Oh, this country has a lot of coal, so therefore I’m just not going to work with them.’ Or, ‘this country has good progress, so I’m just going to focus on sourcing from there,’” he said. “The report shows that it’s really at the facility level where there’s a very high variance [between EECIs]. And, ultimately, that is where those conversations need to happen.”
Just as important for brands and suppliers, he said, is to engage with Cascale’s Manufacturer Climate Action Program, an 18-month initiative that helps participants develop a pathway to measure and reduce Scope 1 and 2 emissions according to science-aligned targets. So far, MCAP has enlisted 85 manufacturers and eight sponsoring brands to validate 49 targets.
Mertens said that the report doesn’t focus on specific interventions. (“That information is out there,” he said.) Rather, it’s meant to serve as “kind of a baseline to say, ‘How are we actually doing?’”
“It’s more common to hear one-off positive stories, or to look at the average case, and say, ‘We’re making good progress,’” he said. “But zooming back out to that industry level is a good reality check to say, well, where are we actually as an industry? How do we make sure that there’s equal visibility into the challenges so that we’re not just passing a hot potato back and forth?”
On where fashion stands, at least, Mertens is certain: First movers remain important, but the rest of the industry also needs to engage in the same way to achieve action at scale. It’s all too simple for an entity, whether it’s a supplier, brand or government, to deny responsibility, even when the geoeconomic outlook is bullish. But commerce abhors volatility, and President Donald Trump’s efforts to bend global trade to his will with ever-shifting policies have dampened investments and stunted growth. Manufacturers, long yoked with the burden of paying for factory improvements, are feeling an even greater squeeze from increased tariff costs and reduced orders.
“I think uncertainty leads to hesitation,” Mertens said. “And there’s always an out to say, ‘Well, it’s not my problem, it’s somebody else’s problem.’ The manufacturer can say, ‘I’m being commissioned to do this, I’m cost pressured, it’s the brand’s problem.’ The brand can say, ‘Well, no, I’m just doing what serves the market, therefore it’s the government’s problem.’ The government can say, ‘It’s outside of our national boundaries.’ There needs to be a pre-competitive, collective action piece that brings together engagement across the supply chain.”
This includes involving more Tier 2 and even Tier 3 suppliers to “get to the bulk of the emissions for our products,” he said. Looking at purchased energy, which doesn’t fall neatly into Tier 1 or Tier 2 but requires deeper supply chain involvement, is also important.
“So if I have a factory that is buying steam, I can’t just say, ‘Great, they’ve phased out coal at their facility,” Mertens said. “We need to look and say, ‘Well, where is that steam coming from? What’s the source of that energy for steam? How are you engaging with that energy supplier as part of that picture?’ Because if all we’ve done is shifted the boundaries where the coal is outside the factory walls, we haven’t solved the problem.”
There are no guilt-free zero-carbon fuels—“certainly not in the current way that we produce them,” he said. Deciding to replace a coal boiler with a natural gas or electric boiler, for example, can be context-specific. Biomass, too, has its downsides. Taking a long-haul view beyond “black-and-white noncompliance” is part of “evolving those long-term partnerships with suppliers to give them more of that certainty to make investments.”
“Coming at a time of greater uncertainty, that just makes it that much harder to do,” Mertens added. “But it doesn’t mean we should stop trying to do it.”
