Trace a textile product from fibre inputs to responsible end of life, identify environmental and social risks, and find practical ways to reduce overproduction, extend product life, and build closed loops.
Purpose of the template
Textiles can have significant impacts on water, energy, chemicals, emissions, biodiversity, labour conditions, and waste. This template helps teams map one textile product or category across its full life cycle—from fibre sourcing and production to use, take-back, recycling, and recovery.
It supports more responsible sourcing, lower-impact fibres, safer chemical use, credible environmental claims, fewer and better-designed products, longer product life, and effective circular systems.
What is included
The template follows six connected stages:
Fibre inputs & sourcing
Fibre, yarn & fabric production
Garment manufacturing
Use & demand
Collection, take-back & reuse
Recycling & closed-loop recovery
Each stage includes guiding questions and prefilled examples of key risks and opportunities, including recycled-fibre share, water and energy hotspots, labour rights, hazardous chemicals, wastewater, overproduction, greenwashing, product durability, fewer collections, repair, resale, take-back, sorting infrastructure, and textile-to-textile recycling.
The final stage feeds back into the first: recovered fibres and materials can become circular inputs for new textiles.
How to use it
Start by completing the Business profile and Textiles profile. Choose one product or category—such as a T-shirt, jeans, workwear, footwear, home textiles, or a collection—before mapping another.
Work from Stage 1 to Stage 6. Add sticky notes with findings, evidence, suppliers, sourcing locations, unanswered questions, assumptions, risks, and opportunities. Use green markers for opportunities or actions to explore, and orange markers for risks, gaps, dependencies, or requirements.
Finish by reviewing the full chain together. Prioritise the most important environmental, social, chemical, supply, and regulatory risks. Agree the strongest opportunities to reduce virgin-fibre use, overproduction, unsafe disposal, and misleading sustainability claims.
Suggested workshop
Run this as a 90–120 minute cross-functional workshop.
Before the session, select one textile product or category and gather available information on fibre composition, suppliers, production countries, material volumes, environmental certifications, claims, product design, sales, returns, take-back systems, and end-of-life routes.
Begin by agreeing the scope and completing the two profiles. Then spend around 10–15 minutes on each supply-chain stage, using the prompts to capture evidence, uncertainties, risks, and circularity opportunities. Mark the most important notes as green or orange as you go.
Use the final 15–20 minutes to agree priorities: the most significant environmental, social, product-design, supply, and regulatory risks; the most promising interventions; and the actions the business will take, support, or lead.
Who it is for
Use this template with sustainability, design, product development, sourcing, procurement, supply-chain, manufacturing, marketing, retail, customer service, legal, compliance, recycling, and leadership teams. It is also useful in supplier discussions, circular-design workshops, due-diligence reviews, collection planning, and textile-strategy projects.
A starting point, not a complete list
The template is deliberately prefilled with suggestions, example risks, and possible opportunities to make it easier to begin. These are prompts—not fixed answers or a complete checklist. Change, remove, add to, or adapt every element to reflect your product, fibres, business model, suppliers, markets, and priorities.
What you will leave with
A shared map of the textile supply chain, its highest-priority environmental and social risks, opportunities to reduce impact and increase circularity, key regulations and standards, evidence gaps, and a practical set of actions for a more responsible textile system.
