Fiber traceability - a Vehicle to Ensure Sustainability or Injustice?
Veronica Bates Kassatly and Terry Townsend.
In honour of Earth Day 2026, with the support of global cotton interests and The Bremen Cotton Exchange, our latest paper examines what passes for traceability in the apparel supply chain – and, like so much in ‘sustainable’ fashion, finds it wanting.
A few failings of concern:
1. From the extraction of the feedstock (e.g., crude oil or natural gas) to the production of the plastic, the risk of highly hazardous chemicals and the incidence of human mortality in the polyester supply chain have been seriously underestimated. With the rise of shale, tar, and tight oil and gas exploitation and the increasing consumption of plastic fibers, those risks are growing.
a) The use of chemicals in oil and gas production is particularly notable in all forms of fracking. In 2024, US oil and gas output totaled 10.7 billion barrels of oil equivalent (boe), 60% more than that of the second-most important producer, Russia. Almost 65% of US crude oil and almost 80% of US dry natural gas are obtained from shale and tight oil formations. Fracking is also expanding in Canada and China. Developments in Russia and Saudi Arabia are expected/underway (see section 2).
A 2022 compendium of US investigations into risks and harms linked with fracking found that over 200 airborne chemical contaminants have been detected near drilling and fracking operations. 61 are classified as hazardous air pollutants. One study found that the elderly who lived closest to wells had a 2.5% higher mortality risk. Another found that children aged 2-7, living near gas wells, were 2-3 times more likely to be diagnosed with leukemia. The list goes on (see section 2).
b) More than 2500 chemicals are used, present, or released by the world’s most common polyester, polyethylene terephthalate, or PET. Only 31 have been evaluated as without hazard. For example, 1,4-dioxane, a byproduct of the manufacture of PET, presents an ‘unreasonable risk to human health’. In 2023, one PET production facility in West Virginia, USA, had an average discharge concentration of 46,140 micrograms per liter. The EPA-acceptable limit is 35 micrograms per liter. Leakage is not limited to production; chemicals in plastic continue to leach throughout its life. A material flow study in China found that the largest release of the PET industry’s preferred polycondensation catalyst, antimony, occurs in manufacturing. But fibers disposed of in landfill, incineration, mechanical, and chemical recycling all release antimony to some extent. Antimony is a regulated contaminant with a toxicity on par with, or greater than, arsenic. Antimony is just one of the 236 chemicals known to be released by PET. Most of the other 235 are without hazard data, so their risk is unknown and non-zero (see section 2a).
2. The notion that polyester production pollutes/consumes very little water is a long-standing fantasy, and all evidence to the contrary has been ignored.
a) In 2016, a C&A Foundation-funded evaluation by the Water Footprint Network found that, even excluding fracked feedstock from their calculations, polyester fiber had an average water footprint of 71,000 cubic meters per tonne of fiber. This finding was misrepresented by C&A in their annual sustainability report as 71 cubic meters per tonne of fiber.
b) Shale and tight oil exploitation has increased the grey (waste) water associated with polyester production significantly. This grey water is generally so toxic that even when treated, it is only suitable for reuse in fracking. Of the principal nations that frack commercially, only China has a good track record on the use of flowback and produced water (FPW). The most common disposal method is underground injection. As of 2022, US FPW was primarily pumped into more than 187,000 disposal wells across the country, permanently tainting the surrounding aquifers.
3. The apparel industry has, for years, suggested that factory fibers, unlike farmed fibers, are standardized, and claimed that basing estimates on just one LCA of European PET production provides representative data for global polyester fiber in general.
a) Even including Turkey, European polyester production is insignificant; it’s only 3% of the global supply. European data is not representative. Further, the base data for manufacturing is from 2009, and the feedstock data is from 2001. From the source country mix to the emissions associated with each country’s output, this data grievously underestimates current impacts.
b) Impacts vary substantially depending on where the PET is manufactured and the type of feedstock used. We have already seen that water use will be considerably greater if the feedstock is fracked. Carbon emissions also vary significantly. Focusing, for example, on flaring emissions, we see that in 2001, when Saudi Arabia was the world's largest producer of oil and gas, Saudi flaring emissions per tonne of oil averaged 0.0012 tonnes of carbon dioxide. In 2024, it was 0.012. That is an increase of 10x. The USA is now the world's largest oil and gas producer. US flaring emissions in 2001 averaged 0.016 tonnes CO₂/tonne of oil. In 2024, it was 0.029. That’s an increase of 80%. Equally pertinently, US 2024 flaring emissions were more than double their Saudi equivalent. It is misleading to suggest that applying updated emission factors to the old national oil and gas consumption mix resolves this issue. It is not objectively representative and still significantly understates polyester’s impact.
4. We estimate that in 2023, around 15% of the world’s polyester supply originated from Russian oil, and the share has increased since. Additional polyester is produced from oil produced in Iran and Venezuela. Indeed, leading Indian polyester manufacturer Reliance Industries has reportedly been sourcing 50% of its oil from Russia to supply those brands enjoying ‘exclusive partnerships’ with the company, including Bottega Veneta, Balenciaga, Hugo Boss, and Adidas. By the same token, the polyester industry in Xinjiang is expanding rapidly, and both polyester staple and fiber are manufactured in the region. We note that virtually all identified Uyghur re-education units have been in industrial complexes, not farms.
5. Even the limited research and analysis that we have been able to undertake for this paper demonstrates unequivocally that sustainable apparel’s long-standing shibboleth, that, unlike farmed fibers, “it is impossible to track synthetic materials back to the source of the crude oil used,” is baseless. The vast majority of global PET polyester comes from Asia. India represents 10% of the global supply, and China produces 75%. Within China, the 10 largest producers have a total annual capacity that exceeds China’s current output. As for feedstock, there are fewer than 1,300 oil refineries in the world. More than 400 are believed to be currently inactive. Furthermore, just 5 countries account for 50% of global oil and gas production. In contrast, there are 10 million cotton farmers in India alone, and cotton is cultivated across multiple different climatic zones, farm sizes, and soil types.
To suggest that you can trace cotton but not virgin polyester flies in the face of the evidence. As does the assumption that farmed fibers need to be traced to mitigate risk and environmental damage, but virgin polyester does not. The contention by some brands and initiatives that they are absolved as they use/plan to use only recycled polyester is equally invalid. Polyester constitutes c59% of the global fiber supply, and of that, only about 12% is recycled, predominantly (98%) from plastic bottles. There is no commercially significant polyester fiber to fiber recycling, so polyester fibers made from recycled PET are effectively unrecyclable, and bottle recycled PET (rPET) is fundamentally, virgin PET at one step removed.
6. Finally, in response to our offer of a right of reply, leading apparel organisations, Cascale and Textile Exchange, respectively, observed that they support neither the simplification of a single score nor the comparison of the impact of fibers from different production systems, particularly synthetic vs. natural systems (see Annexes 1 and 2). A PEF for Apparel and footwear (A&F) is a single score, specifically intended to enable consumers to compare the impact of synthetic vs natural fibers. We can find no record of either organisation publicly speaking out against the use of the French or EU PEFs for textiles and apparel. Indeed, Cascale has served as Coordinator of the EU Technical Secretariat since 2019.
Read the full report here