Evaluating Carbon Footprint in Branded Merchandise

The difficulty we've have in promotional merchandise of course, is we don’t know what happens to them at the end of the life. The question is, once you've given that t-shirt to the end user, what are they going do with it? Are they just going throw it away or are they going try and recycle it? So, we'll never actually know the true CO2 equivalent cradle to grave, but we can work on the cradle to gate.

Measuring The Carbon Footprint of a T shirt

Let's look at some examples

The first one it's a hundred percent polyester t-shirt. It's a sports t-shirt, and the footprint is 2.096 kilos, CO2 equivalent, which probably doesn't mean anything to anybody. Only in the sense that we can use this as a comparison to other items.

If a user has one of these, it's unlikely that polyester would be recycled from a t-shirt. Polyester is recyclable, but only if you have the recycling facility, which is highly unlikely in the UK.

 But you can have recycled polyester. Most recycled polyester coming from polyester bottles.

Look at what happens to the footprint. The footprint goes down by about 25% from two kilos to 1.4, but again you would have the issue of it not being able to be recycled within the standard waste streams.

Let's look at another material, a one hundred percent cotton. And you can see the footprint has dropped again. And the advantage of cotton is that it really is recyclable. They can be collected and recycled.

Here’s an organic cotton. So, what's organic cotton? Organic cotton is still a natural plant, which is farmed, but organic cotton is grown with a lot less water and a lot less pesticides and herbicides.

The consequent effect of that is to bring down the footprint even further. We're now at 0.9 CO2 equivalent, and that organic cotton would be readily recyclable.

I tried to find a hundred percent cotton recycled material. In other words, a t-shirt made from recycled cotton. Couldn't find one anywhere within the world of branded merchandise. The nearest I have was this one, which is 50% recycled cotton, the 50% polyester, which again, is very low. 

The difficulty with going for a blend is that blends are very difficult to recycle because of the different materials.

In Summary:

The hundred percent organic cotton, certainly from the ones that I was looking at, was the lowest CO2 equivalent.

But the other thing to take into account is can it be recycled at the end of its life? Now, in the case of cottons, yes they can, but if I'd have been doing this exercise, not on t-shirts, but on pens, notebooks, bottles. Then we may have got a different answer. In other words, we could have a very low carbon footprint equivalent, but it couldn't be recycled, and then it’s very difficult to measure one against another.

So what's the conclusion? Obviously organic cotton in this case was the most sustainable for a t-shirt. But like I say, whilst t-shirts can be compared, other products are not quite so easy, particularly because of this issue of what happens at the end of life and their ability to recycle.

PDI can provide the CO2 equivalent for many products, but we are actually reliant on information from the manufacturers within the supply chain. Not all companies produce that information so if in any doubt – lets talk.

Thank you.

The video can be found here:

David Platt – BA BSC. MBA and Dip M. as well as academic qualifications David has run Pavilion, a specialist eco products provider, for over 25 years. He is aware of the issues and the greenwash circulating around this topic and is always willing to share information even if the answer is ‘Don’t know!