Our governments and elected officials have an important role to play in ensuring that the clothing we buy and wear has been made by people all around the world paid fairly, working in safe and dignified conditions and without destroying the planet.
It is the government’s job to protect and provide peace and security for its citizens. Policymakers write the rules upon which the economy works. They create regulations that shape our lives and communities and determine the ways in which companies are allowed to conduct business across the globe.
Most governments around the world are obligated to ensure that the fashion industry respects and protects human rights and the environment through a variety of legal and formal commitments they have officially signed up to. This includes SDGs 1, 5, 8, 12, 13, 14 and 15; the eight fundamental ILO Conventions on rights at work; the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; The Aarhus Convention on access to justice for environmental matters; and The Paris Agreement on climate change mitigation. Many national governments, probably yours, promise the protection of people’s fundamental human rights through many of these formal agreements.
However, the fashion industry is largely failing to respect human rights and safeguard our environment. At the same time, governments are not doing enough to uphold, implement and enforce the promises it has made to protect people and planet through these important international agreements and often even through their own national laws.
Governments around the world, as the 2019 UK Environmental Audit Committee report puts it, have “allowed the fashion industry to mark its own homework for too long”
Governments have been turning a blind eye to the fashion industry’s dirtiest practices and are not providing enough assurances to their citizens that the clothes we buy are not made as a result of exploitation.
Governments around the world aren’t making it easy for citizens to be responsible consumers. Often, the only labelling required on clothing is the country of origin. The official EU Ecolabel is one of the only government labelling initiatives that provide some sort of verified guarantee that the product you’re buying is good quality and environmentally friendly. Governments could and should require much more information about the products we buy to be included at the point of purchase. In the food industry, we have ingredient labels but we don’t have the same sort of access to information for our clothing yet.
Governments should make it easy to reuse, repair and recycle clothes
Most governments don’t make it easy for us to reuse, repair and recycle unwanted clothing and textiles. Unfortunately, this is one area where there are very few laws, regulations or governmental initiatives that tackle fashion’s escalating textile waste issue. Curbside textile and clothing recycling exists only in a few cities. In other words, you can’t easily recycle your textiles at home. Although in some places charities will come and collect unwanted items from your home. Few governments provide incentives or make it easy to repair clothing and textiles. One example is Sweden, whose government proposed a 50% tax break for repairs on shoes, clothes and bicycles.
Governments should make companies responsible for the waste they create
Waste is a growing global crisis. Countries such as Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda and Tanzania are phasing out and moving towards a complete ban of importing second-hand clothing, which mainly comes from consumer societies in the West. We are seeing countries such as China stop taking plastic recycling from other countries, and the Philippines is sending huge shipping containers of trash back to the countries it was exported from in the first place.
The Ellen MacArthur Foundation estimates that 25% of garments are collected for reuse or recycling globally, whilst 73% ends up in landfill or incinerated. Most major fashion brands will incinerate defective or unsold stock. In many countries, this is still completely legal. Perfectly good materials are going to waste and being burned in huge volumes. It makes no common sense. Policymakers should ban the incineration of clothing and textiles that could be reused or recycled.
At the moment, most companies are not responsible for much of the waste they help create through the lifecycle of the products they sell. This is what ‘Extended Producer Responsibility’ legislation would help do.
France is one of the countries around the world that requires companies to take responsibility for the textile, clothing and footwear products they make or sell, and any associated packaging, when they become waste. Companies pay an upfront fee proportional to how much product they place on the market, and this levy helps fund the collection of waste and recycling infrastructure needed to deal with any waste created.
Governments should require companies to identify and address harmful social and environmental impacts in their supply chains
Due diligence is the process through which companies identify, prevent, mitigate and account for how they address their actual and potential adverse social and environmental impacts.
The French ‘Duty of Vigilance’ law requires all French companies that have more than 5,000 employees domestically, or employ 10,000 employees or more worldwide, to implement an effective ‘vigilance’ plan to address environmental, health and safety and human rights both in their own operations and at their suppliers and sub-contractors.
Although the regulation is still taking shape, large Swiss companies will likely soon be compelled to undertake human rights and environmental due diligence in their business activities abroad. Swiss companies will be legally obligated to comply and will be liable for damages unless they can prove they have undertaken adequate human rights and environmental due diligence to comply with the law. But most other countries, do not have this sort of legislation in place and companies are allowed to evade responsibility on a systemic level.
Legally mandated due diligence is important because it requires that companies take a much more proactive approach to identify, monitoring and measuring their human rights and environmental impacts across their supply chains. No longer can they turn a blind eye to poor working conditions and environmental degradation. It means companies wouldn’t be marking their homework on their own anymore.
Governments should rewrite the rules of doing business
If our governments are serious about improving human rights, social impacts and environmental sustainability in the fashion industry then it must rewrite the rules of the economy so that shareholder profit is no longer prioritised above the protection of our ecosystems and the health and wellbeing of our communities.
Policymakers will need to pursue far-reaching systemic change much faster in order to tackle poverty, economic inequality, gender inequality, climate breakdown and environmental degradation and achieve the SDGs by 2030.
We would like to see a fashion industry in the future that measures value equally amongst making financial profits, ensuring the well-being of people and communities and safeguarding and restoring the environment.
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