While Garment tags can sometimes be a nuisance, that rectangular piece of cotton or polyester inside your T-shirt is actually mandated by consumer law in many countries. It has to tell you a few things about the garment you’ve just bought, including what it is made from, how to care for it, and where it was manufactured.

As the fashion industry grapples with reducing its Environmental Impact, and communicating these measures to consumers, there are calls for garment labels to be even more detailed. “We sort of really need a garment nutrition label,” the CEO of the Hong Kong Research Institute of Textiles and Apparel, Edwin Keh, says.

The garment labels of the future will probably contain scannable technology – some already do – so a customer can learn about the entire journey of the garment from the farm where the wool or cotton was grown, to what chemicals, dyes or finishes were used in the manufacturing process.

But until hi-tech garment tags are widely available, we asked some experts to explain what clues the “made in” labels of today can tell you about a garment’s environmental impact.

Don’t rely solely on the ‘made in’ label

In some ways, the “made in” label can be a red herring about a garment’s origin. This is because it only tells you where the last process occurred, that is, where it was cut and stitched together.

So if you are relying solely on the garment’s manufacturing location to learn about its environmental impact, there is “a lot of room for error,” says Keh.

Plus, according to the United Nation’s Fashion Industry Charter for Climate Action, assembly accounts for about 9% of a garment’s total greenhouse gas emissions, while fabric production accounts for about 31%.

According to the vice-president of the Higg Index, Jeremy Lardeau, the main environmental impacts of a garment happen before its final assembly: “namely creating the raw materials (farming cotton or extracting crude oil for synthetics), material processing (fibre spinning, textile dyeing and finishing) and the consumer use phase (washing and drying).”

But the garment type might give more information

With a bit of background knowledge, the type of garment can tell you something about how efficiently it was made.

With knitted items for example, Keh says, “you have to process the yarn close to the point of final assembly” – meaning the final manufacturing destination offers some clues about where the yarn was sourced.

This is in contrast to woven garments, like shirts or suits. “They might just come from some tailor shop in country A, which is getting materials from country B, which are grown in country C,” he says.

Keh also points to high-performance sportswear, which is complex to put together and therefore more labour-intensive to make – but might have a more energy-efficient manufacturing process.

He says China is “just faster and better” at making these items because the industry there can produce sportswear at scale. “The entire supply chain from the growing of cotton to the processing of materials, to the assembly is so efficient [and] they have leveraged the scale to use water efficiently, process wastewater more efficiently and reduce energy consumption.”

Similarly, he points out that while France and Italy produce some of the most beautiful luxury items in the world, “if you try to make a high-performance sports products in those countries, it just wouldn’t be that good.”

What about countries with green energy?

Some countries have transitioned to renewable energy at much faster rates than others, such as Costa Rica, Sweden, Iceland and Uruguay; while countries like Germany, Italy, Japan and Sweden are innovation hubs for more advanced eco-friendly technology. But don’t assume clothes made exclusively in these countries will have a lower carbon footprint.

Lardeau says: “There are manufacturers in countries that have a mostly fossil fuel-based electricity grid, who are actually using onsite rooftop solar to power their manufacturing processes. Some even export excess solar power to the grid.

“The reality is that the environmental impact is determined by specific factory-level practices and product design features,” says Lardeau. “This is why supply chain traceability and whole product life-cycle assessments are so important.”

What about buying locally?

It’s tempting to reach for locally made products in the hope they will have fewer air miles and therefore a lower carbon footprint. But that’s not always the case.

“The challenge with the apparel industry is that it operates in probably the most globalised supply chain of any industry in the world,” says Keh. “We grow things somewhere, make things somewhere and consume things somewhere [else].”

For example, despite growing most of the world’s apparel wool, Australia has very limited capacity to turn fleece into final products. About 80% of the fleeces shorn in Australia are shipped overseas – mainly to China, but also to Italy and India – to be washed and processed. So a jumper made in Australia using Australian wool has most likely made at least two trips across the Pacific Ocean.

But of course, there are still non-environmental reasons to buy locally, as your garment purchase supports local business owners, farmers and sectors of Australian manufacturing.

What about worker’s rights?

Since the final stage of assembly involves a large amount of labour, the “made in” label might shed some light on how well (or how poorly) the garment workers might have been paid.

Says Lardeau: “There are countries and regions with higher risks of human rights violations … but ultimately the actual impact to workers comes down to individual factory management practices, which is not only tied to a given country context.

“Even supposedly ‘safer’ countries from human rights violations, like the US, have been shown, even very recently, to harbour human rights violations.”

Become supply-chain literate

Ultimately, to get a true understanding of a garment’s environmental footprint, consumers need specific and transparent information about the supply chain – and many players in the fashion industry haven’t figured out how to communicate this to customers.

“While there are plenty of readily available measures that consumers can look for to give an indication of a garment’s impact, few get to the level of specificity that we believe is necessary,” says Lardeau.

“Consumers investing in their own education and literacy in regard to sustainability in fashion is one of the most important steps that they can take.”

Resources like Good On You and Eco-Cult aren’t perfect, but they are a good place to start and podcasts like Wardrobe Crisis or The Green Dream are engaging ways to explore issues of fashion and sustainability.