Second hand clothes may have gone mainstream - but we still have a long way to go to fix our textile waste problem, writes Baroness Jenkin of Kennington
With only one per cent of clothing textiles currently recycled, Cabinet Ministers in search of something to wear should be looking to Lord Alli's wardrobe rather than his bank account.
We have a textile waste problem and, if serious about its commitment to a more circular economy, the new government should deal with it, not contribute to it. Making the clothing producers responsible for the waste they create is a sensible place to start.
I vowed never to buy new clothes for the rest of my life 15 years ago and it has not been difficult, thanks to the likes of eBay, charity shops, and many swishing events. And yet, while I am proud to no longer include myself in this statistic, it has been estimated that each person in the UK throws away an average of 3.1kg of textiles every single year, the fourth highest in Europe. Where does all of this clothing end up, you may ask. Despite the proliferation of textile collection points across the country, around 350,000 tonnes of old clothes go into household rubbish bins every year in the UK.
While this is far from perfect, it at least beats dumping it in the natural environment, which has been happening with increasing frequency due to the rise of the fast fashion industry. The bleak situation in Chile's Atacama Desert presents a perfect picture of how not to handle our fast fashion waste.
The previous Conservative government set a legally-binding target to halve the waste per person that is sent to residual treatment by 2042, meaning we have a need to direct clothing away from landfill and back into the economy. Before we jump to textile recycling, we must remember what the waste hierarchy has always told us: keeping this resource as a garment for as long as possible.
Second hand clothing is far from a new phenomenon. So why has it only just gone mainstream? The answer is simple: it has become a lot easier. Buying second hand clothing is no longer something some people endure to save money, but now mimics buying first hand clothing in both simplicity, speed, and ease of transaction. With such accessibility, Second Hand September can now be a year long, or indeed life long, commitment.
With over 16 million UK users, Vinted, the Lithuanian clothing resale app, is the case in point. The platform is easy to use for both buyers and sellers alike. This was the missing ingredient in the sometimes arduous, always time consuming, second hand clothing market. It is joined by up and coming brands, like Sojo, offering door-to-door clothing alteration services to ensure we are able to look after the clothes we already own, or prepare the clothes we no longer want for resale.
This bountiful supply of cheap, second hand clothing should hold a mirror up to those who claim that a disposable piece of clothing from the likes of Shein is bought on cost grounds. This addiction to fast fashion, even among those people that profess to care about the environment, will likely mean reuse is insufficient on its own. We must also, therefore, look at the quality of the clothing being created in the first place.
Shoddy quality equals a lower lifespan. We need to make clothes that actually last. As an immediate and popular step towards this, the government should stop businesses from being able to destroy their unsold and returned textiles. They should be forced to properly deal with the mess they make.
The next step should be a more holistic one: creating an extended producer responsibility (EPR) scheme for textiles. Unfortunately this idea was deprioritised by the previous government, but if the new government intends to keep its manifesto commitment of creating a more circular economy, it should proceed with creating a textiles EPR. Indeed, the UK is already behind the curve by not having one, with the likes of France, Hungary, and the Netherlands already proceeding full steam ahead.
Such a scheme could ensure that producers of inferior and non-recyclable clothing products are paying the financial price of doing so, accounting for the hidden price of textile waste in terms of the pollution created and resource wasted. The revenue raised from such an EPR scheme could help to incubate more of these innovative ideas and to finance the textile recycling infrastructure that the UK needs in order to recycle this sea of textiles.
Unlike much of the UK's waste management system, local authorities are not presently involved in textile processing and recycling. Given the private sector innovation that is taking place, we should keep it that way. While a textile EPR scheme can help to level the playing field between businesses, and would be a step welcomed by the ambitious voices within the sector, it must not add unnecessary regulatory burden to businesses. The best way to avoid this is to bring businesses into the scheme design process.
Second hand clothing has gone mainstream in the UK. But we still have a long way to go if we are to fix our textile waste problem once and for all. The new government should level the playing field using a textiles EPR to make businesses responsible for the waste they produce. But it should leave enough room for businesses to manoeuvre and continue innovating our way out of the textile waste problem.
First published by BusinessGreen. Baroness Jenkin of Kennington is a Conservative member of the House of Lords.
Comments