This article is part of our Vogue Business membership package. To enjoy unlimited access to our weekly Sustainability Edit, which contains Member-only reporting and analysis, sign up for membership here.
The US government is busy crafting environmental policies, and in most cases, fashion is asleep at the wheel.
The industry has, to varying degrees and from a range of perspectives, rallied around a few key legislative or regulatory efforts that target or are directly connected to fashion, including the Fashion Act, the Fashioning Accountability and Building Real Institutional Change (Fabric) Act, the Federal Trade Commission’s Green Guides revisions and, for public companies, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) climate disclosure requirement. These will all impact fashion significantly — but there’s a range of others, from the Farm Bill to recycling and plastic waste initiatives, that haven’t received the same attention from the industry.
“If you look at who’s on the record for the recycling bills versus who’s on the record for the Fabric Act, there’s a huge difference,” says Kenya Wiley, policy counsel and fashion law professor at Georgetown University and Fordham Law School’s Fashion Law Institute.
The disconnect is twofold: fashion, particularly since it started moving manufacturing overseas, has not been a priority for legislators, while the largely unregulated industry is accustomed to not engaging heavily in politics. That ecosystem is shifting quickly, however, as environmental and social pressures mount. As governments look for ways to reverse course on the economic structures that have disincentivised businesses from making more sustainable choices, and to incentivise climate-friendly business practices instead, fashion’s absenteeism from politics may end up working against the industry’s own commitments to be more sustainable.
Brands talk about recycling more and using plastic less, for example, so they should be in the room with the policymakers who are drafting bills on those topics. There’s no specific template for what that engagement should look like, but an easy place to start could be for brands to signal through trade associations that they want, and need support, to develop and scale everything from textile recycling to more sustainable agriculture.
Wiley recently launched the Fashion Environmental and Sustainability Policy Tracker in order to help close this fashion-politics gap. “There are so many other initiatives that members of Congress have been working on; we’ve seen a sea change in the focus on climate and environmental policy with the Biden administration and I don’t feel that a lot of people know what’s going on,” she says. “The point of the tracker is to help the fashion industry to be aware of what’s going on at the legislative level in Washington and, when there are opportunities, participate in the policymaking process.”
One initiative addressing plastic pollution has a public comment period open through the end of this month, for instance — a perfect opportunity, says Wiley, for fashion to highlight any specific concerns or challenges it may be facing with regard to plastic waste, so that the appropriate agencies have a chance to take that input into account when revising the proposal.
Proposed initiatives that should be on fashion’s radar include the Farm Bill, a massive piece of legislation passed by Congress roughly every five years that influences not only what crops farmers grow but how they grow them; the Recycling and Composting Accountability Act, which would require the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to improve recycling and composting programmes in the US; the Recycling Infrastructure and Accessibility Act, which aims to establish a “pilot grant programme to improve recycling accessibility”; and the EPA’s Draft National Strategy to Prevent Plastic Pollution, which lays out actions the agency can implement or collaborate on to eliminate plastic waste from being released into the environment by 2040 and to improve post-consumer materials management and infrastructure.
Fashion is largely absent from these proposals. The Recycling Infrastructure and Accessibility Act does not once mention textiles or apparel. The Recycling and Composting Accountability Act, mentions textiles once — in a section on data collection, stating that the EPA will be required to submit a report to Congress with data on “specific recyclable materials, including aluminium, plastics, paper and paperboard, textiles and glass, that were prevented from remaining in a circular market through disposal or elimination, and to what use those specific recyclable materials were lost”.
The EPA’s draft plastic pollution strategy, too, mentions textiles once, citing them as one source of microplastic pollution through microfibres. (It does also say that other strategies will be released to focus on “different parts of building a more circular economy for all, including a strategy on textiles”.) Outdoor apparel retailer Patagonia is the only apparel company listed as having contributed to the EPA’s development of the document. Other organisations listed include non-profits the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 5 Gyres and Ocean Conservancy and investment firm Closed Loop Partners, all of which have worked with or advocated on issues relating to fashion, among other issues and industries.
These proposals are drafted by government officials, and experts are not surprised by their inattention to fashion — it is a largely unregulated industry in the US and beyond. However, they also question why brands are sitting idly by as lawmakers craft environmental policies that don’t set the stage for them to succeed in their own sustainability goals. For all of fashion’s talk about recycling and circularity, there’s little sign in the halls of Washington that it is trying to lay the groundwork for the policies or infrastructure it will need to establish viable textile recycling programmes, for example.
That needs to change, say experts, and it’s wise for fashion to speak up sooner than later — whether through trade associations or by engaging directly with lawmakers, as brands such as Beautycounter have done to advocate for stronger rules on ingredient safety — both because staying quiet may be seen as an endorsement of the status quo, and because early engagement is the most effective way to make sure bills address rather than exacerbate the specific obstacles in the way of making fashion more circular.
“It’s important to be included in the baseline so that as agencies, as they’re looking at how to move forward and Congress as they’re looking at additional bills to introduce, that you will already be considered as part of that discussion,” says Wiley. “As legislation moves through, sometimes it’s too late to make sure that your voice is heard.”
More than brand engagement
The minimal discussion of fashion in Washington is not the only gap in the fashion-legislation landscape. Even in places where brands have been more proactive with policymakers, critics say laws are being written without enough input from other players, such as fibre producers, manufacturers and organisations focused on fashion’s waste problem, who are impacted by the industry.
Last week, a coalition of suppliers released a report, ‘An Apparel Supplier’s Guide: Key Sustainability Legislation in the EU, US, and UK’, for companies that will be impacted by the flood of legislative initiatives in the Global North despite being based themselves in the Global South. The guide is meant to help suppliers align their practices with the new laws, because they will be tasked with implementing the changes necessary for brands to be able to comply. In researching the laws emerging across the Global North, the authors of the report found that they, however unintentionally, are “advocating for a top-down approach to supply chain management” that is often ineffective and “creates significant hidden work for suppliers”, Ilishio Lovejoy, ESG general manager at Simple Approach who spearheaded the collaboration, said during a press conference related to the report. Within days, the report was downloaded hundreds of times and 800 people registered for the launch webinars, according to the Transformers Foundation, a coalition member.
“It’s these suppliers that already disproportionately bear the burden of the sustainability-related work at this moment,” Lovejoy said. “We did not feel like there were suppliers from the value chain informing the development of [most of the legislation], because some of it seems quite impractical.”
If legislation remains “brand-centric”, suppliers are at risk of becoming “buried in substantial paperwork”, Dr. Vidhura Ralapanawe, executive vice president at Epic Group, recently told Sourcing Journal — ultimately hampering progress toward the goal, shared by suppliers, brands and legislators alike, of a more sustainable supply chain.
Regulation is needed in other areas, as well. Scientists have pointedly said that industrial agriculture is a major contributor to climate change, biodiversity loss, soil erosion and water quality issues, among other problems. Just as some food companies have been working to improve their ingredient sourcing practices, fashion brands are increasingly focused on where their fibres come from. Farmers face significant hurdles in switching to more sustainable practices, which is why this is a key aspect of the Farm Bill for fashion to pay attention to. “It takes money to convert from current to regenerative farming. Having those additional resources in the Farm Bill would make a huge difference for designers and suppliers that want to incorporate more responsible materials,” says Wiley of Georgetown.
On the waste side, signs of progress are mixed. The EU released a proposed extended producer responsibility (EPR) scheme earlier this month, the first step in a quest of holding fashion companies more responsible for what happens to their clothes at the end of life. However, it does not address what many advocates say is actually the most urgent obstacle in fashion’s quest for sustainability, the clothing waste that ends up in the Global South.
While movement on EPR in the US is even slower, it’s not nonexistent. Proponents of California’s Responsible Textile Recovery Act of 2023 — which would require brands manufacturing or selling in California to establish a stewardship programme and pay into a fund for collecting garments and textiles that are unsuitable for reuse, and for repairing or recycling them — feel confident that they will eventually deliver a robust and effective bill.
“California always takes the lead in environmental legislation, and this is the first of its kind in the US for textiles. We are really excited, and there’s a lot of energy to get it right,” says Rachel Kibbe, executive director of the American Circular Textiles group, which has been actively engaged with the bill’s sponsors and authors since it was first proposed. “There’s a lot of work that’s going into this and that has been [going into it], and I think that’s a really positive thing. Policymakers understand that this is a topic of importance, and industry is engaged. That is huge. It’s not something that we’re trying to put off in the next two to five years. It’s here, it’s now.”
Comments, questions or feedback? Email us at feedback@voguebusiness.com.
More from this author:
Weighing the future of fashion’s alternative materials, post-Mylo
A new framework for regenerative agriculture wants to help fashion measure impacts
EU’s textile waste proposal overlooks fashion’s main dumping grounds
