Sustainable Design by Fabric Impact Assessment

In the first phase, the developed model focuses on cotton and major cotton blended fabrics, as they make up a significant proportion of textile products. The project team has reviewed a wide range of relevant academic publications, government and NGO reports, LCA databases, company reports and news reports covering different fabric manufacturing processes: from agricultural production, to fabric finishing and finally to recycling. Formulas were developed from the data extracted and assessed from the secondary sources in order to unify the contributions from the different sources. An expert panel comprising senior academics, NGO experts and industry specialists was formed to determine the weightings of 15 factors and 6 manufacturing processes. Users simply input the selected material and production regions of each manufacturing process to generate a sustainability report automatically.

The software encourages users to upload their frontline information and new techniques into the model database, which will progressively enhance the model's capacity and performance. The software fosters a sustainable manufacturing processes starting from the product design stage. It assists relevant parties in making sustainable choices when designing their products. This kind of design intervention has the potential to educate and actually drive the whole industry towards improved green practices.