TEXTILES.ORG
Glimpact, an online platform for analyzing the environmental impact of products and organizations, has announced the launch of the Global Impact Score. The Global Impact Score is a free online tool that measures and analyzes the factors of a fashion product’s environmental footprint. Beyond measurement, the tool also helps identify steps to reduce impact.
Global Impact score is free to use and performs calculations according to the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) methodological framework. This Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) approach considers 16 environmental indicators across the entire product life cycle, with the results aggregated into a single score to be understood as a sort of environmental price. By considering crucial categories including water use, land use, eco-toxicity and more, this systemic vision acknowledges that the environmental crisis is about more than only carbon emissions. This method is adopted as the scientific framework of the European Union (EU) through the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), which entered into force in July 2024.
Key features of the Global Impact Score platform:
- Global environmental footprint calculations: Global Impact Score measures environmental impact across 16 indicators of apparel products from cradle-to-grave, as defined by the PEF method and the PEFCR Apparel and Footwear category rules developed by the European Commission in collaboration with industry stakeholders and validated in April 2025 as the reference framework for the application of the ESPR.
- Analysis of explanatory factors: Assessment results are broken down by life cycle stage and environmental impact category, offering insights into the key drivers of environmental footprint while understanding how this impact is distributed across different environmental indicators
- Eco-design simulations: Users can test changes to material sourcing, production methods, and other variables to see their real-time effect of eco-design initiatives on overall impact.
“The environmental crisis is not just about climate, it’s systemic and must take into account all components of the ecological crisis,” says Christophe Girardier, founder and CEO of Glimpact. “Our new Global Impact Score tool makes the scientific methodological framework adopted by the European Union accessible to all fashion stakeholders. This empowers brands to prepare for and comply with the requirements of the ESPR, which will make it mandatory to declare the environmental performance of each product and comply with eco-design requirements. It is time for the fashion industry to embrace a new era – placing eco-design at the heart of development models and not at a purely marketing and opportunistic level.”
