# Pilot 7: Why Global Textiles? | See Through Carbon

Pilot 7 Locale: Why Global?

World in a shirt: Textiles, clothing and fashion is a particularly global industry. A single garment can be made from fibres grown or extruded in several different countries, processed in another, spun elsewhere, woven, printed and finished somewhere else before being cut and stitched elsewhere, where it’s shipped to another country to be packaged and labelled, before being sold around the world.
Diverse supply chain: Textiles supply chains are not only geographically disparate, but sectorally diverse: designers, marketers, financiers, cotton farmers, polymer extruders, yarn spinners, textile weavers, fabric finishers, textile printers, button suppliers, packaging suppliers, panel cutters, garment factories, wholesalers and distributors, to name a few.

Political/Media pressure: The fashion industry is coming under particularly intense regulatory scrutiny, as it has such a poor record for greenwashing and reckless waste, like FTSE 100-listed fashion brand Burberry burning £27M worth of luxury goods in a year to ‘protect its brand’.
Thirsty products: Textile manufacture presents particular emissions reporting challenges. For example, it is a particularly thirsty industry — many stages, particularly growing crops like cotton, scouring wool, processing fibre or finishing textiles, are exceptionally water-intensive.
Technical: The embedded energy and associated carbon emissions in these processes place unusual demands on the accurate reporting of all three Scopes.Textiles merits its own Pilot because See Through Carbon’s ecosystem must accommodate as comprehensive a range of sectors and reporting methodologies as possible,

Methodology: See Through Carbon describes the methodologies it uses for different Pilots in detail on its website, updating them whenever they are improved. For Scopes 1, 2 and many elements of Scope 3, the Greenhouse Gas Protocol (GHGP) is widely accepted as the best available methodology, but it can be inaccurate or impractical to use when certain elements (e.g. water usage) fall outside general norms, so other methodologies might be more accurate or feasible.
Dynamic improvement: As a free, open, transparent ecosystem, See Through Carbon makes all its methodology public, publishes correspondence with regulators regarding compliance, and encourages public scrutiny. The Expert Panel determining STC methodology is motivated purely by accuracy, not commercial concerns about arriving at ‘acceptable’ outcomes. This enables STC to incorporate best practice, and new research, and give participants confidence they’re ‘ahead of the game’ when it comes to carbon reporting.

Comprehensive: The interlinked nature of carbon reporting, with every supplier and end user part of any customer’s Scope 3 calculation, means that in principle it doesn’t matter where to start, i.e. which entity, or connected entities, should make the initial application. Accurate calculation of any one entity’s Scope 3 emissions requires the accurate calculation of all parts of its upstream and downstream suppliers/customers.
Consistency: Ultimately, all levels and strands of any hierarchy are interconnected, and all will benefit from consistently applying the same methodology.

Having said this, Pilot 7 applicants might want to consider how best to administer the Pilot to suit the textile industry. Some options:

Retail: Start at the point of sale with any retailer of any scale, and accurate calculation of their Scope 3 will involve upstream suppliers and downstream customers.
Consultancies & Data Providers: As regulation tightens to avoid endemic waste in the clothing industry, many specialist consultancies or data providers are tracking entire fashion industry supply chains, using a battery of data integrations and monitoring inputs. Integrating See Through Carbon’s reporting ecosystem may be relatively straightforward, and help them provide even more actionable, verifiable, auditable data.
Raw Materials: For natural fibre producers at the top of the supply chain, there is overlap with Pilot 6 (Global Farming). This could provide another entry point to a comprehensive, accurate calculation of the entire textile supply chain.