The Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) published its report on the fashion industry and the waste that it creates. The report outlines how British people buy more clothes per person than any other country in Europe. What’s more, this amounts to more than 300,000 tonne of textile waste flooding landfills or being incinerated. The report makes a number of recommendations, including creating mandatory targets on sustainability for all fashion retailers that have an annual turnover of £36 million (approximately $47 million) or more.
It also advances a scheme called Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) scheme. EPR would allow for monitoring compliance with sustainability criteria—for example identifying water usage and how to reduce it—and give benefits to companies who lower their environmental impacts. In practice this might mean a one-penny-per-garment charge which could be waived when retailers demonstrate they have attempted to reduce their impact in meaningful ways.
The report urges the government to support these efforts by shifting taxation systems to more directly encourage reuse, repair and recycling. It also advocates using models like those in Sweden that reduce VAT on clothing repair. This report offers a refreshing insight into an industry that has cultivated rock-bottom prices at a high, hidden cost. It highlights the people caught in its exploitative manufacturing chains and the wider public, who are getting poor-quality merchandise that is harming the environment. The report zeroes in on how fast fashion has failed and how a return to a culture of paying more for quality that will last is one of the key answers.
