Energy consumption and Carbon footprint of Cotton Yarn Production in textile industry
Textile industry with its diverse and complex processes, poses multiple challenges when it comes to standardising and benchmarking its various processes. This study has analysed energy inputs and related emissions of cotton yarn production, from cradle to factory gate boundary, including phases from farm, transport to ginning, ginning, transport to spinning plant and spinning and packaging. The study is conducted, according to International standards Organisation (ISO) 14040 series of standards for Life Cycle Assessment.Obtaining relevant data for various phases was among the challenges addressed in this work, since efforts to compile life cycle inventory data for India are very recent. Also, the relevant data are scattered across diverse sources, or simply not available in the open literature. Data has been collected from various resources such as journal articles, ministry of agriculture data, Indiastat database, personnel communication, reports etc. All the embodied energy inputs for the cotton production, such as fertilizer, pesticides, electricity, human and animal inputs, seeds and diesel are considered. Embodied energy values from this data shows that farming has large variability in the inputs due to geographical variations and farming type and type of the farmers. Diesel and fertilizer input shares the maximum inputs, along with the electricity. Data pertaining to spinning is collected from personnel communication with a spinning mill in Uttarakhand district, India. Electricity is a major input in spinning process, with water being the second major input within plant. Current energy and emissions analysis of yarn production is expected to improve the supply chain by focusing on the phases which have the higher impact which in turn will help to enhance decision making in the textile production processes. The analysis revealed that sustainability of farming phase can be improved by using modern better management practices such as drip irrigation and use of organic farming to reduce the overall impacts.Energy consumption efforts must be taken at the spinning pahseto reduce overall mpacts.