Fashion's Emissions Went Up 14% in Two Years. Polyester Is Most of the Answer.
You didn't choose your fabric for its carbon footprint.
You chose it for hand feel, for price, for what your customer expects a hoodie to feel like at that price. That's the right way to choose a fabric.
But a number landed on September 1 that's worth ten minutes of your attention, because it changes what a fabric decision actually means over the next two years.
The Apparel Impact Institute published its annual Taking Stock of Progress Against the Roadmap to Net Zero report. Industry emissions reached 1.004 gigatonnes of CO2e in 2024 — up 6.3% from 2023, on top of a 7.5% rise the year before. Roughly 14% in two years, and the second consecutive year of growth.
The direction is the story. Not the tonnage.
And the report is unusually direct about the cause: growing fiber use, especially petroleum-based polyester.
The Number Went Up. So Did Everything That Makes It.
Emissions didn't rise because factories got dirtier.
They rose because the world made more fabric.
Textile Exchange's 2025 Materials Market Report put global fiber production at 132 million tonnes in 2024, up from 125 million the year before. Polyester was 59% of that output — roughly 78 million tonnes — and 88% of polyester came from fossil feedstocks.
Textile Exchange attributes about 43% of the sector's emissions impact to polyester alone.
So the two curves are the same curve. More volume, more polyester, more emissions.
That's the industry picture. Here's the part that matters to you.
Your Sewing Floor Is 8% of the Problem. Your Mill Is 55%.
This is where most brand-side sustainability work quietly misses.
Aii's tier breakdown of the sector footprint, from the 2025 edition of the same report:
Apparel sector emissions by supply chain tierTIERSHARETier 2 — knitting, dyeing, finishing55%Tier 4 — raw material extraction22%Tier 3 — yarn & material processing15%Tier 1 — cut and sew, finished goods8%
Textile processing — knitting, dyeing and finishing — accounts for 55% of apparel's emissions footprint. Cut and sew accounts for 8%. Source: Apparel Impact Institute, Taking Stock 2025.
Read that again.
The facility you audit, visit, photograph and put in your brand story is 8%.
The mill you've probably never named in a deck is 55%.
Wet processing is heat. Heat is fuel. That's the whole equation, and it sits one step upstream of the factory most brands think of as “their” factory.
Which means the highest-leverage decision you make on emissions isn't the sewing partner. It's the fiber you spec and the mill that processes it.
Those are decisions made at development. On a tech pack. Months before anything ships.
Recycled Polyester Isn't the Escape Hatch You Were Sold
The instinct here is to spec rPET and move on.
Slow down.
Recycled polyester reached 9.3 million tonnes in 2024, up from 8.9 million — but its share of total polyester slipped, because virgin production grew faster. And textile-to-textile recycling still sits at under 1% globally. Almost all rPET in apparel is bottle-derived.
It's a real improvement over virgin. It is not a solved problem, and a supply chain that can't tell you which mill produced the yarn can't substantiate the claim on your hangtag either.
We wrote in the spring about how consumers are rethinking polyester as a word and a story. This is the same shift, arriving from the supply side instead of the shelf.
What This Actually Changes on a Costing Sheet
Nothing, this quarter. Quite a lot over three seasons.
Polyester is an oil derivative, and it prices like one.
Cotton has its own weather and acreage story. Polyester tracks petrochemical feedstock. Those two inputs stopped moving together some time ago, which is why oil volatility has been rewriting knit cost structures more than most brands realize.
If your blend ratios were set when polyester was structurally cheap, they were set against a different market.
Traceability is becoming a costing line, not a values line.
The USFIA 2026 Fashion Industry Benchmarking Study, released in July, found nearly 73% of US fashion companies plan to increase resources for sustainability, social responsibility and compliance — with traceability and ESG data collection named as focus areas.
That work has a cost. It is cheaper when it's designed in and brutal when it's retrofitted.
Fewer, deeper supplier relationships are how the data actually gets collected.
The same study found companies moving from geographic expansion toward consolidation — fewer partners, stronger ones. Not for sentiment. Because you cannot get Tier 2 visibility out of a vendor list you refresh every season.
Where Nearshore Quietly Helps — and Where It Doesn't
IN-BODY IMAGE — Guatemala knit production floor
guatemala-nearshore-knit-production.webp
Alt text: “Nearshore knit apparel production in Guatemala supporting shorter lead times and lower overproduction”
Let's be honest about the limits.
Producing in Guatemala instead of Asia does not change the emissions arithmetic of polyester. Fiber is fiber, and Tier 2 is Tier 2, wherever it sits.
What proximity changes is everything downstream of the fiber decision.
Shorter transit. A 35-day knit production window to the US instead of a quarter-plus. Which means smaller, later, more accurate buys — and the largest avoidable emissions in apparel are the units nobody wanted.
Overproduction is the part of this report that doesn't show up as a fiber statistic.
It also changes what you can see. When production and socially compliant manufacturing sit inside one accountable partner rather than across a brokered chain, “which mill knit this yarn” is a question with an answer.
That's the honest version of the nearshore argument on sustainability. Not lower fiber emissions. Better decisions, made later, with fewer units wasted and a supply chain you can actually describe.
The Report Is About the Industry. The Decision Is Yours.
Two consecutive years of rising emissions is not a story about villains. It's a story about volume.
And volume is the one variable a brand actually controls.
The brands that come out of this well won't be the ones with the best sustainability page. They'll be the ones who moved the fiber conversation into development instead of marketing, asked their partner a hard question about Tier 2, and stopped buying units on a nine-month guess.
The number went up again this year.
What you spec next season is a small part of next year's number. It's a very large part of yours.
MTAR has spent more than two decades building full-package knit programs — tees, sweatshirts and hoodies — from development through DDP delivery, with CAFTA-DR compliant yarns and nearshore production in Guatemala and Pakistan. If you'd like a second read on the fiber and mill decisions inside your current program, let's talk.
Questions We're Getting
Why did fashion industry emissions rise if brands are all setting climate targets?
Because volume grew faster than efficiency improved.
Aii's 2026 report shows emissions reaching 1.004 gigatonnes in 2024, up 6.3% year on year, while individual suppliers and brands posted real reductions in renewable energy use and coal phase-out. Both things are true. The sector made more fabric than it saved carbon.
Is polyester worse for emissions than cotton?
On a per-kilogram fiber basis, virgin polyester carries a fossil-feedstock footprint that cotton does not, and Textile Exchange attributes roughly 43% of the sector's emissions impact to polyester at its current 59% share of production.
But fiber choice is only one input. Wet processing — Tier 2 — is 55% of the total footprint regardless of which fiber runs through it, and cotton carries water and land questions polyester doesn't. The useful comparison is program-specific, not fiber-versus-fiber.
Where in my supply chain do apparel emissions actually come from?
Not where most brands look.
Aii's tier breakdown puts finished-goods manufacturing — cut and sew — at 8% of the sector footprint. Textile processing, meaning knitting, dyeing and finishing, is 55%. Raw material extraction is 22%, yarn and material processing 15%.
The mill matters more than the sewing floor.
Does recycled polyester solve this?
It helps. It doesn't solve it.
Recycled polyester grew to 9.3 million tonnes in 2024 but lost share as virgin output grew faster, and textile-to-textile recycling remains under 1% of production globally. Most rPET in apparel is bottle-derived, which is a different circular loop than the one the hangtag usually implies.