Understanding energy use in nonwovens
Nonwovens aren't one industry — They're dozens of processes
From spunbond to meltblown, needlepunch to wetlaid, electricity intensity across nonwoven production technologies spans nearly an order of magnitude.
The EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) State Aid Guidelines were amended in December 2025 to include nonwoven PRODCOM codes — specifically 13.95.10.10, 13.95.10.20, 13.95.10.30, and 13.95.10.50 — amongst the sectors eligible for indirect cost compensation against carbon leakage risk. EDANA welcomes this recognition of the nonwovens industry as a strategically significant, energy-intensive sector within the EU industrial base, supporting critical value chains in hygiene, medical, filtration, construction, automotive, and energy transition technologies. Extending eligibility to nonwovens producers is a sound strategic decision that helps preserve European manufacturing competitiveness against electricity-cost pressures faced by international competitors.
The sector at a glance
1.9M+
51bn
European (EU 27) nonwovens production exceeded 1.9 million tonnes (and 51 billion square meters) in 2025, supplying applications spanning but not limited to baby diapers, menstrual products, incontinence, medical drapes, filtration, insulation, roofing, automotive upholstery, carpet packing, crop covers, and cable wrapping . This scale and diversity of end-use makes the sector a critical contributor to Europe's industrial base and manufacturing resilience. Yet this essential sector is facing aggressive and unfair competition.
How nonwovens are made
Nonwoven manufacturing follows a multi-stage process — web formation, web bonding, finishing treatment, and conversion — each carrying distinct electricity demands. Web formation alone includes several routes: using natural or synthetic fibres (drylaid carded, drylaid high-loft, short-fibre airlaid, wetlaid), or directly extruding polymers (spunlaid, meltblown, and electro-spinning), each feeding into different bonding methods (thermal, mechanical, or chemical) before finishing and conversion into finished products. This structural diversity means that "nonwovens" is best understood as a family of related but technically distinct manufacturing systems rather than a single production process.
Three variables that shape energy intensity
Process route
Independent member-reported data shows electricity consumption ranging from roughly 0.52 MWh/tonne for hydroentangled (spunlace) products to 4.0 MWh/tonne for meltblown, with spunbond, spunmelt/SMS, airlaid, wetlaid, needlepunch, chemical bonding, and thermal bonding each falling at different points along this spectrum. This nearly eight-fold spread reflects genuine differences in thermal and mechanical energy requirements between technologies, not inefficiency.
Published operational and engineering reference data is aligned with EDANA members reported data and demonstrates that electricity consumption varies substantially across production configurations, such that no single figure can adequately represent the sector (Peksen et al, 2023, Toffe et al., 2019, and ALnonwoven reference).
Polymer Chemistry
The melting point of the fibre-forming polymer directly governs the thermal energy required at every heat-intensive step — extrusion, thermal bonding, and calendering.
160–165°C
250–260°C
Polypropylene melts at approximately 160–165°C, requiring meaningfully less thermal and electrical energy per tonne than polyethylene terephthalate, which melts at approximately 250–260°C. Two production lines with identical output and grammage but different polymer inputs will therefore record materially different energy intensities. Polymer choice is itself use-case driven; polyester is favoured for durable applications like filtration, construction, and industrial products due to its strength and heat resistance, while polypropylene dominates hygiene and medical applications for its softness and skin-contact suitability.
Different processing steps, including fibre blending, carding, cross-lapping and bonding, are required to produce specific nonwoven structures and material properties. These steps are often a prerequisite for achieving the required functionality, quality, consistency and durability of the final product. As such, the energy consumed during these stages is an inherent part of the manufacturing process and contributes to the overall energy demand of the nonwoven material.
Product grammage
Higher-grammage nonwoven products generally require greater energy inputs and longer processing times, which contribute to overall energy demand. These requirements are often inherent to achieving the necessary functionality and performance of the product.
Lightweighting — reducing material per unit, an established sustainability improvement — increases energy consumption per tonne of output, because a fixed energy component tied to extrusion, carding, web formation, and bonding initiation does not scale linearly with basis weight. A 13 gsm spunbond product can consume roughly 17% more energy per tonne than a 22 gsm equivalent, and for some processes, energy use per kilogram more than doubles below 70 g/m².
This creates an important nuance: measures that reduce environmental impact through material reduction can appear, on a per-tonne energy basis, to move in the opposite direction.
The Heat-and-Steam factor
Across many nonwoven and fibre-manufacturing processes, heat and steam represent three to five times more energy input than electricity, meaning electricity figures alone tell only part of the sector's energy story. This matters increasingly as producers pursue electrification of heat and steam demand as a decarbonization pathway: substituting one unit of electricity for two to four units of steam can deliver substantial greenhouse gas reductions and lower total energy consumption, even as it raises the electricity share of a site's overall energy mix.
Why this matters
As regulators, investors, and industry stakeholders develop energy and efficiency frameworks that touch manufacturing sectors, understanding this technical diversity is essential to designing measures that reflect real production conditions.
A nonwovens site's electricity intensity depends on its process route, its polymer inputs, and the grammage of its products — three independent variables that together explain most of the variation seen across the sector.