Sustainability assessment of textile and apparel sector: a review of current approaches and tools

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to provide an overview of sustainability evaluation techniques in textile and apparel sector. The review studies are divided into two namely product relate assessment methods and integrated assessment methods which summarizes the different dimension covered, weightage, number of indicators involved, and highlight the weakness and strength of the previous developed sustainability assessment methods in the textile industry. The analysis revealed that majority of the product-related assessment methods focused on environmental factors only, while all the studies reviewed in this category neglected triple bottom line (TBL) in their assessment approach. Nevertheless, there is still a need to focus more on integrated assessment tools to fulfil the TBL goals. This current study offers comprehensive details of product related assessment and integrated assessment methods that was published from 2010 to 2022. Furthermore, examined current sustainability evaluation methods and offered insights into how sustainability assessment techniques have evolved in the textile and apparel industry. The review showed the product related assessment tools are impact assessment techniques are frequently used as an independent tool for evaluating the specific impact of one sustainability measurement, also have no weights attached to them because most indicators assessed were more generic. While integrated assessment method revealed that results would be less reliable if weighting and data collection were non-standardized and inconsistent. However, from the uncertainty’s perspectives, only integrated assessment tools considered fuzziness, grey and stochastic ambiguities in some of their methods, whereas product related assessment tools studied, ignored fuzziness and grey uncertainties completely.