The EU’s impending apparel legislation is ambitious, but Tone Skårdal Tobiasson, author and journalist, doubts it will do anything to reduce overproduction – on the contrary, it might amplify it. Her solution? Targeted Producer Responsibility.

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock the last couple of years, you cannot have missed the fact that the EU is about to unleash a tsunami of policy measures, regulations and directives that will profoundly affect the textile and sportwear industry. The mantra is that we need more durable, repairable and recyclable apparel in order to reduce the textile industry’s impact and put fast fashion out of fashion. The sector is also being pushed to become more circular, through incorporating recycled content, take into account social issues and microplastics need to be addressed, at source.

Various trade press and internet sites have attempted to make sense of the impending changes; however, most have overlooked the simple fact that making apparel more durable will most likely entail more plastics (or synthetics), and thus more microplastics. The response will also likely be more mixed materials, which remain virtually impossible to recycle at scale.

In other words, the means risk undermining the end goal of volume reduction.

Durability is indeed important, but it’s important to consider it in context of the product in question. For most product-groups, purchases mainly replace something that no longer works, such as a coffee maker. Here, improved durability can indeed reduce waste over time. Apparel, in contrast, sees only one third of clothing going out of use due to being “broken.”

Targeted Producer Responsibility

So how does one solve the conundrum the apparel industry is facing with rampant over-production? The research team in the project Wasted Textiles, which is funded by the Norwegian Research Council and the Norwegian Retailers’ Environmental Fund and lead by Consumption Research Norway at Oslo Metropolitan University, have suggested Targeted Producer Responsibility (TPR). This is a variety of Extended Producer Responsibility, but rather than eco-modulating at the design stage (making products more durable, repairable and recyclable), TPR looks at the waste-streams to see what products actually end up there prematurely.

Through “picking analysis” of apparel that has been delivered as “broken” or no longer needed, for labels and tags to determine the brand, fibre content, and season put to market in Norway. The latter is not mandatory, but many brands have codes that identify exactly this, so that the interns can ascertain how long the product has been in use. They also photograph all the items, in order to document their “state.” And guess what, the team found many items with the price tag still on, in the waste!

What does TPR look like in practice?

Taking this information and translating it into an actual TPR fee, is suggested as following: Length of service life, volumes for each brand and how much value the products can capture vs. how costly handling them in the waste phase is (e.g. can they be repaired for a second life or do they need to be recycled or downcycled?). The fee for something that has never been used (with the price-tag on) will of course be very high. A well-cared for coat that has been used for 20 years, on the other hand, would get off Scot-free.

Representative “picking analyses” of waste streams are already the go-to for several product groups to approximate their actual overall waste impact, so this same method just needs to be applied to the textile sector. One can also imagine artificial intelligence being used to expedite this process in the near future.

We have shared the idea with several high-level EU bureaucrats. They have, so far, promised to take a closer look, as it so novel they never even thought of approaching EPR from this angle. They do already agree, however, that the idea takes the waste hierarchy and polluter pays principle seriously. We think that this is a good start, but call on other industry players to consider how Targeted Producer Responsibility could actually lead to reducing over-production and join the effort!