TEXTILES.ORG
Textiles have typically been an industry with high energy consumption. In some circumstances, it can be highly labor-intensive, depending on the level of modernization. A February 2026 report from the European Environment Agency notes that textile consumption in 2020 in the European Union had the third highest impact on water usage and fifth highest use of raw materials and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions compared with other consumption categories.
The textile industry has been addressing these issues, and it has opportunities to be more climate-friendly while diversifying and increasing the production of functional textile products.
The textile industry must prioritize “the three E’s”: economic sustainability, environmental sustainability and energy sustainability.
Energy and raw materials
Energy use is key to reducing GHG emissions. Reducing consumption and the types of energy sourced need to be considered. Routine machinery maintenance, such as on gears and belts, and using oil-cooled transformers will help reduce consumption by keeping equipment working efficiently.
In major textile manufacturing countries such as India, coal-fired plants are common—and not climate-friendly. To increase profit margins in the spinning sector, awareness has grown about renewables.
“Renewables helped to keep plants running when the demand was low,” says Velmurugan Shanmugam, general manager of Jayalakshmi Textiles, based in Aruppukkottai, India. The company is a fine-yarn cotton mill that has its own power generation using wind and solar sources.
Captive consumption in its windmill enables the company to save 3 rupees (approximately $0.03) per kilowatt-hour (kWh), Shanmugam says. As a case in point, 1 kWh in the state of Tamil Nadu, where the mill is situated, costs 9 rupees (approximately $0.10), whereas power from renewables works out to 6 rupees (approximately $ 0.06) per unit of power. He says the initial capital investment is high for establishing windmills, but proper utilization will enable a return on investment in six years.
Reduce, reuse, recycle
Raw materials used can directly impact climate-change concerns. The textile industry uses natural fibers, synthetics and blends in developing products appropriate for different applications. Particularly in advanced textiles markets, synthetic fibers occupy
a primary role, as functionality is critical.
The three R’s of “reduce, reuse, recycle” have been in practice in the manufacturing industry for some time. To realize their full potential, logistics—including securing the availability of recycled precursors—are getting streamlined, with support from fiber producers, recyclers and brands.
“In the textile ecosystem, circularity is a relatively new economy, and it has to be scaled up to create value,” says Brendan Kelly, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Department of Plant and Soil Science at Texas Tech University.
A major issue has been that most postconsumer goods end up in landfills. While there has been some success in reducing the problem, the bottleneck lies in categorizing textile waste and removing toxic chemicals such as PFAS.
At present, brands are leading efforts to promote sustainable practices in sourcing and manufacturing, which is encouraging, but a feasible supply chain of recycled textiles must be scaled up.
Promising technologies
In addition to reducing GHG emissions directly through energy usage, companies can attempt to reduce a final product’s weight or shipping footprint—without affecting the final end-use functionality—to save shipping emissions.
For example, the nonwovens industry has successfully brought down the grams per square meter (gsm) of layers in hygiene products to as low as 5–7 gsm (0.15–0.21 ounces per square yard). Such weight reductions also reduce the cost of the product and reduce landfill burdens.
Additionally, new processing technologies can support green manufacturing. Low-pressure and atmospheric-pressure plasmas offer tremendous advantages, such as dry techniques for coating textiles, which use less water and chemicals. Inert gases are predominantly used to generate plasma energy.
Another promising technology that the electronics sector has successfully adapted to its advantage is supercritical fluid processing. The garment textile finishing segment has started to realize the potential in this area.
Industry collaboration has enabled the launch of supercritical CO2 for waterless dyeing. India-based Arvind Ltd. has collaborated with Deven Supercriticals and H&M Group to bring the technology to production in Ahmedabad, India. Aravind claims that in the case of garment dyeing, the waterless process provides up to 76% water savings and about a 67% energy reduction.
The advanced textile industry should explore inorganic and natural compounds to functionalize and develop a new range of products to reduce its dependence on petroleum-based formulations. This area has not been explored much and will be impactful for the industry. In this regard, the Technical University of Liberec in the Czech Republic has been a pioneer, for example, exploring basalt rock particles for developing fibrous materials.
Learning from the natural fiber industry
The natural fiber industry has been at the forefront in adopting climate-friendly processes. Cotton Inc. has been funding basic research and applied projects to look at best agronomic practices such as efficient irrigation, fertilization and drought tolerance as a way of mitigating global warming.
In agronomy, the manufacture and application of nitrogen fertilizer impact global warming. In the U.S., cotton production has been showing a downward trend in pounds of CO2 per pound of fiber. Sustainable production methods such as supplemental irrigation and no-till practices have been proven to reduce GHG emissions.
According to Cotton Inc., if 20% of global cotton growers adopted the no-till method, GHG emissions reduction would be equivalent to removing more than 700,000 vehicles from the roads per year.
A climate-friendly future
Global geopolitical scenarios, availability of resources, global pollution and an uncertain economy all demand that manufacturing be advanced and agile. The textile industry is now more aware of the need for a balanced and strategic approach in sustainability, but the advanced textile sector has difficult challenges, due in part to its heavy dependency on petroleum-based materials.
The advanced textile sector can look to natural materials to develop products and formulations and explore biomimetic approaches. Processing technologies that are emerging and/or established in other disciplines, such as chemistry, physics and engineering, could be tailored for developing industrial textiles. This sector is in a good position to be a pioneer in creating a more climate-friendly industry.
Seshadri Ramkumar, Ph.D., is a professor in the Department of Environmental Toxicology and The Institute of Environmental and Human Health, Texas Tech University.