Silk production suffers steep fall
Sustainability consultant and economist Veronica Bates Kassatly has said she thinks the negative portrayal of silk in the Higg Materials Sustainability Index (MSI) has had an impact on production of the fibre.
The index gives an average impact score for silk fabric of 1086 kilos of CO2-equivalent per kilo, compared 36.2 per kilo for polyester.
Ms Bates Kassatly has long argued that the Higg’s insistence on comparing lifecycle assessment studies (LCAs) that have been produced using different boundaries and methodologies, generates “illogical, unscientific, and unjust outcomes”.
She recently told non-profit organisation Fibershed that almost all the silk used in global fashion comes from China and is 100% rain-fed, but that the MSI attributes a high score for water scarcity to silk because it bases its assessment on data from 2006 from 100 farmers in India who relied on irrigation.
The International Sericulture Commission (ISC), a UN-affiliated agency that supports the development of the silk industry, has asked the Sustainable Apparel Coalition to change the way it presents silk in the Higg MSI, but without success.
ISC figures show that global annual silk production fell from 202,000 tonnes in 2015, to 91,800 tonnes in 2020, a decline of 54%. Over the same period, polyester production increased from 52 million tonnes of fibre in 2015 to 57.1 million tonnes in 2020. This represents an increase of almost 10%, albeit the 2020 figure was down by 1% compared to 2019’s.
“You can only compare LCAs that have been produced using exactly the same boundaries and methodology. There is no standardised suite of LCAs for global fibre production,” Ms Bates Kassatly said.
