Juulia Suuronen: Sustainability assessment of products and sectors

This dissertation project studies the sustainability of textile fibers and the forest sector. The project aims to analyze the sustainability of bioeconomy and set thresholds to ensure that its products and sectors are sufficiently sustainable in the context of global environmental crisis. The sustainability of the most common textile fibers, namely polyester, cotton and viscose, was assessed using the Absolute Environmental Sustainability Assessment (AESA) method. The results reveal that none of the three fibers are sustainable when their life cycle impacts are compared to the environmental carrying capacity assigned to textile fibers. Similarly, the AESA framework was applied to the EU forest sector to assess its sustainability. The results indicate that the sector is not operating within its share of environmental carrying capacity and that ignoring biogenic carbon may lead to an underestimation of the sector’s climate change impacts over short time horizons.

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