Confusion?
The strategy potentially slips into confusion with the promotion of re-sale and second-hand markets within the EU while simultaneously aiming its sights on the export of ‘waste’ to other countries. As we’ve seen recently with campaigner-led nascent legislation to denote post-consumer textiles as hazardous waste, regulators would be advised to stick to objective science. Closing off exports to discourage linear models is understandable but labelling non-hazardous feedstocks as ‘hazardous’ inadvertently creates a moral obligation for campaigners and legislators to push for closure of the second-hand clothing market and therefore textile-to-textile recycling within the EU.
The vision for textiles that are free from problematic levels of problematic chemicals being used in products designed for circularity is certainly good but the road to achieving it, with the old clothes we currently have in our wardrobes, is very challenging.
This means the exact cost will be based on the yet to be decided ‘sustainability’ of the product in question.
To deal with textiles at their end-of-life there will be extended producer responsibilities and a cost of registration that will be ‘eco-modulated’. This means the exact cost will be based on the yet to be decided ‘sustainability’ of the product in question.
Here, it appears there is not so much of a blank canvass, but the skeleton of a straw man being created with references to novel fibres (which we know will not scale before 2030), renewable energy and, unsurprisingly, ‘fossil-fuel content’.
Fossil fuels – again
The issue of fossil fuels is one that is significant, but Ecotextile News would argue that it’s increasingly important to create a ‘fossil fuel footprint’, that considers fossil fuel usage throughout the whole production process and not simply what’s in the product at point of sale. Also, with circularity being a key pillar of the strategy, recyclability has to be a consideration and synthetics may ultimately be easier to recycle than natural fibres, and raw material input streams may be easier to set up.
If the EU is truly concerned about the objective impact assessment of textiles on the environment it is also imperative, they set up an independent multi-stakeholder committee to agree and assess a basket of key environmental parameters – and not have a group of officials being used as a punchbag for the industry itself or for single issue lobbyists.
This launch session was ostensibly to give an overview of the strategy and identify business opportunities but, as with some recent legislation, in the short term there’s a danger this may well result in more jobs in the pen, ink, and legal industries than in the EU textile sector. That said, the legislators are trying to look beyond the immediate future and, if they get things right, Europe could look forward to a buoyant textile recycling industry, provided the quality and overall eco-footprint of recycled products prove to be as good as current virgin products.
The most significant, and the most concerning aspect of today’s presentation though, was the response to a question on how the sustainability credentials of products would be validated.
The answer? Silence.
No-one on the panel had an answer to this and no-one attempted to answer it. For any legislation to be successful it must be practical and clearly, we have situation where this hasn’t been considered – which leaves the door wide open to estimates, averages or the blunt, and crass weapon of fibre type being used as a proxy for impacts.
That is in effect: greenwash.
This strategy and supporting legislation could be game-changing, but if it results in arbitrary fibre taxes it will have failed both the industry – and the planet.
