PE Americas heads up a LCA project for the US cotton industry

Key members of the US cotton industry are coming together to compile a comprehensive cotton lifecycle inventory (LCI).

Called Vision 21, the inventory’s data is intended to serve as a foundation for global cotton lifecycle evaluations and a credible base for sustainable textile operations.

The project, expected to take about a year, involves The Cotton Foundation, the National Cotton Council (NCC), Cotton Council International (CCI) and Cotton Incorporated. PE Americas will head up the project.

“Vision 21 is a project of the Cotton Foundation that involves three major areas of study,” NCC President/CEO Mark Lange said. “A critical component of the project is an independently conducted life cycle environmental and energy analysis for cotton consumer products.”

“The goal of the collection of this current, third-party and peer-reviewed data is that it will become a gold standard for manufacturers, brands and retailers interested in bettering their environmental bottom line,” said J. Berrye Worsham, president and CEO of Cotton Incorporated, adding that it will also serve to further demonstrate the environmental gains the US cotton industry continues to make along every link of the supply chain.

The Life Cycle Inventory / Life Cycle Assessment project will use data from the top cotton-producing countries of India, China and the US. Similarly, a sampling of key cotton textile-producing countries, including India, China, the United States, Turkey and Latin America, will be used for manufacturing benchmarking.

Lange also noted that the US cotton industry is confident that a transparent and well-documented cotton lifecycle inventory - one that easily can be integrated into both proprietary and open source LCA software - will benefit the industry. And, along with data set collection and tool creation, the ultimate goal is to make the information globally available.