Carbon Footprint

A carbon footprint tallies emissions across three buckets defined by the GHG Protocol: Scope 1 (direct emissions a company creates itself), Scope 2 (emissions from purchased electricity), and Scope 3 (everything upstream and downstream — fiber farming, spinning, dyeing, shipping, and how the customer eventually washes and disposes of the shirt). For apparel brands, Scope 3 routinely accounts for more than 90% of the total, and within that, fiber production and wet processing — dyeing and finishing — usually outweigh cut-and-sew and transport combined.

Practically, this is the number a sustainability-minded buyer wants attached to a specific SKU, not a vague brand statement — grams of CO2e for one printed tee, ideally broken down by stage. We've had corporate clients request this figure for annual reports before approving a bulk order, and most blank suppliers simply don't have it calculated at the garment level; it usually has to come from a life-cycle assessment run on the fiber and mill, not the print shop.

If a client needs a real carbon-footprint number rather than a marketing gesture, ask for the underlying life-cycle assessment or Higg MSI data behind it rather than accepting a rounded, unsourced figure — claims without a stated system boundary, cradle-to-gate versus cradle-to-grave, aren't comparable to each other.

People often assume the printing and decoration step is where most of a shirt's footprint comes from, since that's the part they can see happening. It's usually a minor slice — growing and processing the fiber and dyeing the fabric carry far more weight than screen printing a design onto a finished blank.