UK Clamps Down on Textile Waste, Ups Recycling
The United Kingdom’s Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs has laid out a new and comprehensive roadmap for handling all kinds of waste, including textiles, to be enacted gradually over the next few years.
Under the heading “Maximizing Resources, Minimizing Waste,” the edict presents a plan for making it as easy as possible to do the right thing for the environment in the face of an enormous cost-of-living crisis. Residents around the country are up against crippling cutbacks in health care, a winter of “heat or eat,” increasingly unaffordable housing and the shuttering of countless small businesses that are the backbone of many small towns and cities.
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The U.K. government dubs the move toward circularity and sustainability “one of our biggest opportunities” and reminds consumers how much ground was gained in sustainability efforts before Covid-19 hit.
“Resources on our islands—indeed our planet—are finite and precious,” the report said. “Success relies on us, as a society, to change our relationship with how we use [those] resources.”
It’s an England-only drive, but with a nod to similar programs in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, that flags seven specific sectors. They are construction, furniture, electronics, vehicles, plastic and packaging, food and textiles.
Reducing textile waste means extending the life of any products, steering them away from landfills and creating a profitable textile recycling industry. The government wants a strong circularity program pegged to resale, rental and repair in addition to post-consumer reprocessing and recycling. Establishing these things, the government may reach its goal of the near elimination of municipal biodegradable waste in landfills beginning in 2028, and halve residual waste per person by 2042.
Fashion and textiles are resource intensive, consuming vast quantities of non-renewable resources that lead to extreme levels of emissions, pollution and waste. Worldwide, the sector accounts for between 4 and 8 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, growth of which is exacerbated by the challenges of dubious and opaque multi-national supply chains that make transparency and traceability difficult.
In England alone, more than one million tons of textiles are said to be disposed of each year, divided almost equally between clothing (400,000 tons) and non-clothing textiles (430,000 tons), or 4.2 percent of all municipal waste.
The U.K. aims to strengthen its already strong collection system to increase domestic sorting and reprocessing of textiles in order to capitalize on the growing demand for recycled materials. Currently, it collects 620,000 tons of used textiles for reuse and recycling every year. Collections of this nature are vital to keeping material out of landfill and incineration, but there are no economies of scale for comparison.
One bright spot in the U.K. is the resale market for garments. It will reach $57 billion in sales by 2025, up from $27 billion this year, according to the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs, which released the new rules. Even the London department store Selfridges is on that bandwagon with a shop selling secondhand items. Last September, it predicted that by 2030, some 45 percent of all transactions will come from circular products and services.
The U.K. created a number of projects in 2021 to jump start its textile management efforts, including Textiles 2030, the U.K. Sustainable Textile Action Plan, a voluntary program run by the Waste and Resources Action Program. Signing on means agreeing to ambitious 2030 targets, including a 50 percent reduction in the carbon footprint of new products and a decrease of 30 percent in water use. Current signatories represent more than 62 percent of all clothing on the U.K. market. They will also collaborate on 2030 targets in three areas: designing for circularity (longevity, recyclability, better fibers), circular business models (resale, rental, subscription, repair, upcycling), and closing the loop on materials (turning clothes back into clothes).
Greenwashing is also in the crosshairs as a way to quell waste. The Competition and Markets Authority, the U.K.’s regulatory watchdog, is taking aim at misleading environmental claims and will bring legal action if claims do not meet the following criteria: clarity, truthfulness, transparency, fairness, substantiated with fact, and applying to the full lifecycle of the product.
Other provisions under consideration are a framework for advising businesses managing textiles, apparel and materials, a requirement that businesses over a certain size provide customer take-back systems for used textiles and requiring stringent prior sorting in order to train the lens on those items that can be reused, redistributed and recycled, like returns, surplus and unsold stock.
The government has also funded a number of programs to further support the recycling effort. They include a 2.5 million pound ($3.07 million) circular economy innovation fund and a 150,000 pound ($192,000) award to develop an Extended Producer Responsibility scheme in conjunction with the U.K. Fashion and Textiles Association, the British Fashion Council and the British Retail Consortium.
