Project summary
Peloton de Paris is Belgium’s first cycling café and a small business that is thoughtful about their impact on the planet. They have created their own line of cycling apparel that they sell worldwide, and asked us to conduct a comparative life-cycle assessment (LCA) of two of their cycling jerseys. Both are polyester based, but one uses virgin polyester and the other is made from recycled polyester.
Systems modeled in the study
The diagrams below illustrate the supply chains for the two jersey product systems modeled in this study. The functional unit for the LCAs is one cycling jersey. The system boundary is cradle-to-warehouse in both cases.
LCA tool and LCI database
We used our new carbon modeling tool, CarbonScope, to conduct the LCAs in this project. The life-cycle inventory (LCI) database underlying the analysis is CarbonScopeData.
Results
The three life-cycle impact categories considered in this study are embodied carbon (Kg CO2e), embodied energy (MJ) and embodied water (L). The table below summarizes the LCA results and shows the significantly lower environmental impacts from using recycled materials. The study also found that switching to ground transportation for delivering the jerseys to the warehouse in Belgium would further reduce the environmental footprints of the jerseys.
Detailed report
https://www.cleanmetrics.com/pages/Peloton-LCA-final-report.pdf