Brands treat Higg MSI scores as settled fact when they compare raw materials. Textile Exchange just showed how shaky that ground can be.
As carbon accounting has become a significant driver of a business’s environmental strategy, public reporting, and sourcing decisions, LCI databases have become critical resources for the apparel and footwear sector. A few of these tools have gained more market share. Ecoinvent contains more than 20,000 datasets on how materials and chemicals are made, making it the largest general-purpose database of its kind, well ahead of GaBi (Sphera), which holds roughly 15,000 datasets, and WALDB (World Apparel and Footwear Lifecycle Assessment Database), the fashion industry's own alternative. All three sit behind paid annual licenses, so none of this underlying data is something a brand, a supplier, or LHCA can pull and check independently without buying access first. Higg MSI, the scoring tool most brands already use to compare raw materials' environmental impact, draws on several of these at once: GaBi as its primary background database, with ecoinvent, WALDB, industry-submitted data, and outside literature layered in as secondary sources.
LHCA members know that we have concerns about how leather is represented in these databases, a concern that is shared with the broader natural fibers community. Textile Exchange is in the process of testing whether the current findings in these databases hold up when measured using a broader data set. The study relies on the same core as a traditional LCA: ISO 14040/14044 standards, but takes a more localized, granular, and place-based approach to how data is sourced, categorized and applied. Textile Exchange published a cotton LCA in March 2026, a polyester LCA in June, and a cashmere LCA in July. Leather hide has been on its list of LCA priorities since 2022, and studies on leather hide, nylon, wool, and mohair are due throughout 2026 and into 2027.
The polyester LCA findings have been particularly interesting. Studies to date have relied on generalized global proxy assumptions for virgin polyester, but this study provides the first publicly available, isolated dataset for virgin PET production in Southeast Asia, part of a broader Asia region that produces over half of the world's virgin polyester. When studying this deeper, the researchers identified a gap in one chemical: ethylene glycol, sold industrially as MEG (Monoethylene Glycol), a key input to virgin PET (Polyethylene Terephthalate), the plastic that becomes most virgin polyester and much of the feedstock for chemically recycled polyester too. The researchers identified that in China, a growing share of MEG is being sourced from coal. The standard model in ecoinvent assumes MEG comes from oil or natural gas, which means coal-to-MEG is not modeled.
According to this research, coal-based MEG carries a climate impact up to 92% higher than the oil-or-gas route. Once that's factored through to finished polyester, the products modeled in the study saw their carbon footprint climb 15 to 21%, and up to 32% for the Chinese recyclers most reliant on virgin MEG as an input. The study is also cradle-to-gate only, meaning it stops at the factory gate and does not account for what happens after a garment is worn and discarded. Polyester's durability, or lack of it, doesn't factor into these numbers either way.
How is this relevant to leather? Textile Exchange isn't testing polyester to make a point about leather, and its own data isn't meant to be read that way. But it is a preview of what happens when a study stops treating a database's assumptions as settled fact and tests against how materials are produced today, including the multitude of different methods for and locations of production. That's precisely the gap IDI is being built to find, not just for polyester, but for any material scored on data nobody has gone back to check.