True Cost Calculator: Free online tool for fashion professionals reveals the real societal costs of a garment
A free online tool for fashion professionals to measure, compare, and minimize the environmental and social impact of garments throughout the entire lifecycle, has been developed under the Horizon 2020 SCIRT project. The True Cost Calculator (TCC) helps fashion professionals to understand and reduce the environmental and social impact of their collections by comparing and adjusting lifecycle scenarios from raw material production to end-of-life. The tool is intended for fashion designers, buyers, sustainability managers, and other decision makers in fashion companies.
The TCC reveals the real societal costs of a garment, both environmental and social. It does this by converting these “invisible” external costs into a monetary value, giving a clear picture of what a garment truly costs over its entire lifecycle. The difference between the retail price and this “True Cost” is known as the True Cost Gap. The TCC helps understanding where these costs come from and how they are broken down. For instance, it shows which stages of production cause the most harm and where the biggest improvements can be made. The longer a garment is worn, the lower the True Cost per wear will be.
There are various ways to determine the societal costs of an environmental or social impact. The TCC builds on the True Price Foundation’s monetization approach. This method calculates what it would cost to remediate or repair the damage done to the environment or to the people working in the industry, to a state at least as good as if the violation had not occurred.
These remediation costs are categorized into four types (restoration, compensation, prevention and retribution) and combined to determine the total remediation cost for both the environmental (1) and the social (2) impact.
To calculate the environmental impact, TCC follows the principles of the life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology. The data provided by the user about the entire lifecycle of a garment, from production over use to disposal at the end-of-life, are linked to the Ecoinvent LCA database, and then translated into environmental impacts by the ReCiPe 2016 life cycle impact assessment method. When a user lacks specific information about a certain aspect of the lifecycle, the TCC uses default industry data to fill the gaps.
To calculate the social impact of a garment, the TCC makes an impact assessment based on country and industry specific data focusing on five, selected as most pressing, social impact categories from the PSILCA v3 database: fair salary, health and safety, child labour, forced labour, gender discrimination and freedom of association. Currently, the social impact considers a limited selection of countries with a significant share of textile related activities. The list of countries will be expanded in the future based on user feedback and additional research.
