Environmental Impact of Footwear Using Life Cycle Assessment—Case Study of Professional Footwear

Abstract

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a method for assessing the environmental impact of a product, activity, or system across all the stages of its life cycle. LCA can identify the activities with a major impact on the environment throughout the life cycle of a product. To analyze the environmental implications of footwear, the LCA was applied to a pair of shoes designed for professional use. In this paper, the impact of a single pair of shoes was studied. Every year, footwear production worldwide is over 22 billion pairs, which has a significant impact on the environment. In this case study, the “cradle-to-grave” approach was used, which refers to all the activities involved in the life cycle of a footwear product, starting from raw material extraction, manufacturing, use, maintenance, and, in the end, disposal. The LCA was conducted using the SimaPro software. The environmental impact assessment of the analyzed shoe needed the acquisition of two crucial datasets. Background inventory data were sourced from the Ecoinvent database (version 3.3). The impact was quantified using the Global Warming Potential (GWP) metric, which calculates the contribution of emissions to global warming over a 100-year time limit according to the established values provided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The impact of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions was measured in relative carbon dioxide equivalents (kg CO2eq) to facilitate a standardized comparison. The results show that the total carbon footprint for a pair of safety boots is 18.65 kg of CO2eq with the “component manufacture” stage as a major contributor accumulating almost 80%.