Bilan Carbone & ACV: the winning duo for managing your fashion industry's climate strategy

In the fashion industry, two major trends have emerged in recent years. On the one hand, carbon footprint assessments have become widespread in order to meet regulatory requirements and establish a climate trajectory. On the other hand, product life cycle assessments (LCA) have gained momentum, driven by the AGEC law,environmental labeling, and the future Digital Product Passport (DPP).

However, these two approaches are still too often treated in isolation within brands. What if combining them were the key to transforming these obligations into genuine strategic management tools?

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Two complementary approaches... but still too often separate

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The Carbon Footprint®: a macro view of the company

The Carbon Footprint provides an overall picture of an organization's carbon footprint by measuring its greenhouse gas emissions according to three scopes: scope 1 (direct emissions), scope 2 (indirect emissions related to energy) and scope 3 (other indirect emissions from the value chain).

This approach addresses three challenges:

• Regulatory: comply with European and national directives (CSRD, CS3D) that are gradually imposing detailed non-financial reporting requirements.
• Financial: meeting the requirements of banks and investors, who are increasingly making their financing conditional on ESG criteria
• Commercial: responding to growing customer demands for environmental transparency

The new version of the Association Bilan Carbone's reference framework now distinguishes between three levels of maturity:

• Initial assessment: identification of key issues and definition of actions for the next 4-5 years
• Standard assessment: refining data collection, reducing uncertainties, building a medium-term trajectory
• Advanced assessment: integration of carbon measurement into annual management, connection with accounting

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LCA produces: a micro view at the service of supply

At the same time, environmental regulations at the product level have prompted brands to structure their data:

• Since 2022, the AGEC law has required the display of environmental information.
• Environmental labeling is gradually becoming widespread.
• The European Digital Product Passport (DPP) will come into effect in the next few years.

These obligations create strategic opportunities for brands: to differentiate themselves from fast fashion, offer transparent communication, better control their value chain, and identify concrete eco-design levers.

All this data, which is collected for regulatory purposes, represents significant potential for improvement that is often untapped when it comes to improving carbon footprints and transforming it from a reporting tool into a genuine management tool.

In most brands, these two approaches remain very separate. The result: different teams, different tools, parallel data collection, and few operational bridges.

This situation creates several problems:

• A carbon footprint assessment that does not recognize eco-design efforts
• Accurate product LCAs but disconnected from climate trajectories
• Time wasted on redundant collections
• Potential inconsistencies between the two approaches

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Scope 3: the decisive issue in fashion

In the textile industry, most of the carbon footprint lies outside the company's walls, in scope 3. Between 80 and 95% of a fashion brand's carbon footprint comes from this scope, mainly from raw materials, manufacturing stages (spinning, weaving, dyeing, garment making), upstream transport, use, and end of life.

These proportions vary depending on the segment:

• In the luxury sector: fewer units sold, therefore a greater relative weighting of services (marketing, retail, customer experience)
• In the mass market: the impact of products is extremely significant

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The three consequences of an inaccurate Scope 3

A scope 3 treated in an overly generic manner generates three major impacts:

1. Stakeholder engagement compromised

With generic emission factors, it becomes difficult to translate the results of the carbon footprint assessment into concrete objectives for product, purchasing, or sourcing teams. Eco-design efforts are not reflected in the assessment, which can demotivate teams.

2. Limited understanding of the origin of impacts

Overly generic emission factors lead to results that are of little use. The areas of analysis are limited: it is impossible to obtain detailed information on impacts by product range, material family, country of manufacture, or supplier.

3. Reduced capacity for action and risk of poor investments

Without sufficient detail, action plans cannot target the right impact hotspots. Brands risk setting unattainable goals (which can be problematic when this work is used to negotiate loans with banks) and investing time and money in levers with little real impact.

Instead of being a decision-making tool, carbon footprinting remains a simple reporting exercise.

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How the ACV product improves the CarbonFootprint®

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Your product data: a hidden treasure for Scope 3

Various regulatory requirements are pushing brands to structure their product data: detailed composition, weights, countries and manufacturing sites, processes used, logistics. This is exactly the data needed to make Scope 3 much more accurate.

Including LCA results in the carbon footprint assessment allows you to:

• Associate brand-specific emission factors with each product
• Identify impact hotspots more accurately
• Highlighting eco-design efforts in carbon footprint results

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Three cases of industrial organization

To effectively link carbon footprint and LCA, it is essential to understand and take into account your organizational model. There are three typical cases:

1. In-house manufacturing and logistics

When the brand owns its own workshops and warehouses, the carbon footprint based on actual physical flows (materials, energy, water, waste) can be used to calculate specific emission factors for each stage of production, thereby improving the quality of the product LCA.

2. Manufacturing & import logistics

When production is completely outsourced, it is the generalized LCA across the catalog that refines the scope 3 calculation and significantly reduces the uncertainties of the carbon footprint.

3. Hybrid organization

Some of the products are manufactured in-house, while others are outsourced. We therefore combine a carbon assessment of internal physical flows with LCAs for imports, resulting in a reciprocal bonus between the two approaches.

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Improve the accuracy of yourCarbon Footprint® with a 3-step product LCA:

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Step 1 – Define the scope and ambition

The objective is to clarify the "why" and "how far" of the approach:

• What are your priority objectives? (regulatory compliance, SBTi trajectory, getting teams on board with eco-design, responding to customer/bank requirements)
• What is the organizational scope and product scope?
• Which internal stakeholders should be involved in the project?

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Step 2 – A single data collection to meet multiple objectives

Rather than increasing the number of data collections, the recommended approach is to organize a single structured collection that can be used simultaneously forcarbon footprinting, product impact measurement, and regulatory compliance.

Specific collection templates are set up for "organizational" data (energy, travel, fixed assets) and "product" data (materials, weight, country, processes, volumes, logistics).

At the end of this stage, the brand can already:

• Calculate the carbon footprint of your catalog
• Complying with certain obligations (AGEC, environmental labeling)
• Launch eco-design initiatives
• Start working on Scope 3

This step generally takes between 6 and 9 months, depending on the maturity of the available data.

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Step 3 – Conduct the carbon assessment by incorporating LCAs

You can now integrate LCA results into the correct emission categories (scope 1, 2, and 3) of the carbon footprint. Based on this baseline carbon footprint, you can develop an impact reduction trajectory (possibly aligned with SBTi) and an action plan for each business unit.

The goal is not to produce yet another report, but to implement concrete management tools on two levels:

• Macro: corporate vision for management, banks, investors
• Micro: product/range/sector vision for operational teams

All this is done with a view to continuous improvement: with each cycle, you can improve data quality and refine your levers for action.

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The ROI of a unified approach combining BilanCarbone® and LCA

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1. Reduce the time spent collecting data

Without a unified approach, brands often collect the same information multiple times for different purposes. By aligning BilanCarbone® and LCA with a common data collection process, you avoid duplication and optimize the efforts of your internal teams, in a context where CSR resources are often limited.

2. Ensure consistency of results

When approaches are taken in parallel using different methodologies, it becomes difficult to reconcile the results. By working with a unified approach from the outset, Scope 3 is based on product data that is consistent with LCA data, and the indicators presented to stakeholders are more accurate and reliable.

3. Identify more levers, with better figures

By integrating product LCAs into their carbon footprint calculations, brands can improve the accuracy of their Scope 3 emissions and thus identify more ways to reduce their impact. This is the case for the Grain de Malice brand, which was able to increase the accuracy of its Scope 3 by 50% thanks to the implementation of LCAs. This enabled the brand to build a realistic reduction trajectory, which was used in particular in discussions with banks.

Laure Dewatre, Purchasing and CSR Manager at Grain de Malice, explains: "In fashion, most of the carbon footprint is in upstream Scope 3. To build a pragmatic and achievable trajectory, everything depends on the quality of the data and the accuracy of the baseline carbon footprint."

The transition from a very generic assessment to one enriched by LCAs has increased the number of initiatives identified in Scope 3 from 5 to 17 concrete initiatives, which are much better quantified and more actionable.

Discover Grain de Malice's feedback.

4. Turn obligations into competitive advantages

Thanks to a close link between LCA and carbon footprint assessments, brands can:

• Precisely target the materials, suppliers, countries, or processes that contribute the most
• Simulate the impact of eco-design scenarios
• Challenge the product offering: certain high-impact references may be questioned.

Generic emission factors are often conservative. As soon as specific factors derived from LCA are used, there is frequently a 10 to 15% reduction in total reported emissions, simply because the reality of the brand is better described.

5. Autonomy and continuous improvement

This approach allows brands to gradually gain autonomy. With the right tools, teams can regularly update their data, simulate scenarios, and dynamically steer their trajectory.

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