In 2020, the EU Commission published a Circular Economy Action Plan that aims to make sustainable products the norm in the EU, support the EU’s target of carbon neutrality for 2050 and promote sustainable growth. The textile industry has been identified by the EU Commission as one of the sectors with the greatest environmental impact and the lowest sustainability, along with four other industries.
In practical terms, this means that the EU Commission will issue regulations that will affect how this industry designs, produces, markets and disposes of its goods. Some of these regulations will be implemented in the next few years and their impact will be potentially massive. This action plan is unprecedented in scope.
This series of posts aims to provide information and insight into the wide-ranging conversations currently taking place in the apparel and footwear industry. This post will first provide a general overview of the extent of the EU regulations in question and how they will affect virtually every player in the value chain, from sports to luxury brands, from manufacturing companies, from fiber to to the product and to waste management. Detailed contributions follow, outlining, for each key issue addressed, the current proposals, their future development and potential direction, how they will impact industry strategies and operations, and how these regulations are transforming the apparel and footwear industry into a Technically support sustainable and circular industry. The most important points of discussion are the initiative for a sustainable product policy, transparency at European and German level and finally waste management.
First of all, we are dealing with an extremely dispersed industry, both in terms of the number of companies and the countries involved. There’s no equivalent of an absolute leader like Apple or Google when it comes to t-shirts and pants. Instead, you’re dealing with a multitude of brands and retail companies interacting with a vast network of often small and medium sized manufacturing and farming operations scattered across the globe, making this one of the industries that collectively am most could benefit from effective and well thought out regulations.
Some of the solutions currently being discussed require strong coordination between the industry and policy makers, whether for the development of new solutions such as fiber-to-fiber recycling or to support the construction of new infrastructures for information exchange along the complex value chain.
Looking at all the regulations in the pipeline today, they will impact every phase of a product’s lifecycle, right from the start.
The production
A new regulation is pending, the initiative for sustainable products. Considered the mother of all sustainability regulations, this regulation will set requirements for how a product is designed, from minimum quality levels to a minimum content of recycled raw materials. It will have a direct impact on how products are and will be.
After this is fully integrated on the sustainability side, the other major shift for apparel and footwear will be digitalization. This also includes the creation of a digital twin for all garments that are placed on the EU market, the digital product passport, which accelerates the flow of information between all different actors, from manufacturers to brands to governments.
The procurement
A draft regulation on due diligence was recently published. As it stands, it requires virtually every brand doing business in Europe to have robust programs in place to prevent and mitigate all potential problems (global warming, water scarcity, forced labour, poor working conditions and others) along the entire value chain, from raw materials (the… cotton field) to end of life. This requires constant improvement and clear plans for how to achieve tomorrow what has not yet been achieved today.
The effort for improved traceability, especially upstream, for monitoring and quality improvement programs is significant. And the potential liability is measured in percentage of sales.
The marketing
The textile industry has often been accused of greenwashing. At the same time, brands, retailers and manufacturing companies are demanding stricter regulations to end the practice. To this end, the UCPD3 (Unfair Commercial Practices Directive) was updated in December 2021. Two more regulations will be published in 2022, one on substantiating green claims aimed at verifying the measurement of your product’s environmental performance, such as its carbon emissions, and one on empowering consumers.
Read more: [EU-Kommission – weniger Greenwashing und mehr Information für Nutzer:innen]
These regulations aim to make it easier to compare information and provide people with more well-founded information.
If you are making or planning to make a statement about the sustainability performance of your product or brand, it is important to incorporate it to avoid investing today in something that will soon be obsolete or potentially illegal.
The product lifespan
Eventually it will change the way you think about the end of life think of your products. By 2025, all waste in Europe must be collected and sorted. To treat this waste and turn it into resources, a set of regulations is being discussed and many countries are developing schemes to make brands and retailers more accountable for the products they place on the market, establishing new sorting and Support recycling infrastructures and accelerate the transition to a more circular business model.
All of these regulations will have a dramatic impact on operations along the entire apparel and footwear value chain.
To ensure that these regulations are effective and lead to a real carbon footprint reduction and an improvement in working conditions, the Policy Hub is actively gathering all the knowledge of the apparel and footwear sector to be a voice of the industry and the policy makers in it to support promoting a circular and sustainable clothing and footwear industry.
This article was written by Baptiste Carrier-Pradal, Chair of The Policy Hub. The Policy Hub – Circularity represents more than 700 stakeholders in the apparel and footwear industry, including brands, retailers and manufacturing companies. The Policy Hub for Apparel and Footwear is working to accelerate change by bringing the industry together to make policy recommendations that promote circular economy in the apparel, footwear and textile industries. The Policy Hub was launched in 2019 by the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, the Global Fashion Agenda and the Federation of the European Sporting Goods Industry and was later supported by two other partner organisations, Textile Exchange and ZDHC Roadmap to Zero Programme.
This article was previously published on FashionUnited.uk. Translation and editing: Barbara Russ