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So I’ve been seeing a lot of people on here conflating cheap clothes and fast fashion over the last few days, and some pretty crazy conjecture about the objectives of the Waste Action Plan that simply aren’t backed up by a reading of the document. THREAD.
While I hate to burst anyone's rant bubble with an inconvenient truth, the fact of the matter is that NOWHERE in the plan does it say the government wants to charge people more for cheap clothes, or as I've seen it put 'ban cheap clothes’. What it seeks to tackle is fast fashion,
or more specifically, the waste that generates. We’re not currently treating that as a separate waste stream, which means several tonnes of textiles per person per year going to landfill - not all ‘cheap clothes’, but if something was cheap, we tend to think of it as disposable.
First off, some background: I worked in fashion for 16 yrs, starting when fast fashion was just emerging as an exciting new business model, and ending when I could no longer stomach any involvement in one of the most socially and environmentally damaging industries on the planet.
There's a distinction between ‘fast fashion’ & ‘cheap clothes' that I think is being missed. Cheap clothes are just that: clothes that are cheap. But they're not necessarily the problem. The inherent unsustainability of the fast fashion model is what we need to urgently address.
Fast fashion is so-called because it’s literally about speeding up retail & trend cycles so that we buy more. That intentional acceleration impacted high end fashion, mid-range fashion, and low cost fashion, because it’s not about the price so much as the speed of the turnover.
But it’s now normal for low-margin, high volume fast fashion retailers to have 52+ drops a year, which is an absurd amount of choice, stock, and resources being pumped into sustaining a business model so broken that its answer to falling sales is often to produce EVEN MORE.
And yes, poor labour and environmental practices are endemic in the supply chains of such retailers, but we know that, and the same can be said for mid-range & high end purveyors of fast fashion, who just cream a little (or a lot) more off the sale of their 'not cheap' clothes.
But at the low cost end of the spectrum, retailers like Penneys are not stacking ‘em high and selling ‘em cheap in an altruistic effort to clothe poor people. If they were they would spend significantly less money on glossy store fit outs and slick influencer campaigns.
Instead, retailers (like Penneys, and others, with the complicity of the media) spend lots of money convincing us all that it’s normal to buy new clothes every week. That you should overhaul your wardrobe every season. YOU SHOULDN’T!! LOL, it’s literally killing the planet!
Leaving aside the appalling labour practices (because the Waste Action Plan isn’t about that), where the worst social and environmental damage is being inflicted is in the countries that make our clothes and the countries where we dump them when we decide they are rubbish.
Our fashion consumption in Europe increased by 40% between 1996 and 2012, and fast fashion (at all price points) has only accelerated since then. Textile production is one of the highest sources of global emissions; synthetics & natural fibres are both massively resource-heavy.
In Ireland alone, we send 63,000 tonnes of textiles to landfill a year, and almost half of what we donate to charity shops & clothes banks ends up shipped away to contribute to ‘toxic soups’ of rotting clothes, somewhere we don’t have to think about them. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8044313/Shocking-report-reveals-cheap-clothes-resold-end-rotting-Africa.html
Loads of our clothes are basically plastic, and only 1% of all textiles worldwide are currently recycled - even that process is resource-heavy and limited due to the complex fibre blends that are now the norm. So what is this plan doing about it? Well if you read the document...
there's an EPA study into textile waste due for completion this year, and a bunch of EU Directives coming down the tracks, including an EU strategy on textile waste and the impact of fast fashion. This is important because three of the biggest FF retailers are based in the EU.
And when are we banning cheap clothes and punishing the poor? Well, sorry to disappoint, but that’s not proposed at all. Pending completion of the European Commission Textile Strategy, and the findings of the EPA study, concrete measures proposed in the Waste Action Plan include:
Developing a framework for separate textile waste collection, banning them from household waste, landfill & incineration. This is 100% a GOOD thing. Most textiles are nasty and chemical-laden, they don’t break down & they don’t belong in landfills, here or in the Global South.
Reviewing regulations for clothes banks. GOOD. Countries in the Global South don’t need our rubbish, & our disposable fashion is ruining their indigenous fashion industries as well as our own, which is why promoting eco-design with Irish designers & retailers also = GOOD 
Improving data on used textile waste. GOOD! The more we understand the extent of the problem, the better we can tackle it. Also: Supporting education on textiles. GOOD! This can’t come soon enough and I hope it starts with mandatory sewing classes for secondary students!
Everyone I’ve ever taught to sew has come away from it with a new skill AND a newfound appreciation for the work involved in garment production. And people should understand fabric composition so they can buy better, properly care for their clothes and make things last longer.
And finally: establishing a 'textile action group' to, among other things: capitalise on the value of the industry in Ireland - which is great, let’s start growing flax here and make Irish linen the high-value export item it used to be;
and: explore the idea of a producer responsibility scheme for textiles. YES! Let people drop last year’s curtains & cushions back to Ikea, or drop the €12 sequinned joggers they wore once to Electric Picnic back to Penneys, and let THEM deal with disposing of them responsibly.
The action group will also examine the role of economic instruments (ie levies) on fast fashion to see if it might slow the rampant consumerism we’ve embraced so enthusiastically in the last two decades. Here’s where some of you see ‘punish the poor’, but, a few things to note:
1) Fast fashion already punishes the poor, just not here in comparatively well off Ireland. 2) It’s not a levy on cheap clothes. A 'fast fashion' levy would apply to Penneys, Zara, H&M, and you could climb the price ladder from there into boutique brands that also over produce.
3) It doesn’t say it's a consumer levy necessarily. Eg: a punitive corporate levy on dead stock could be stunningly effective. That’s stock that definitively hasn’t sold, that they literally can’t give away, and that ends up in the mountains of unworn clothes to be burned by H&M,
Or the stock burned by a Swedish power plant instead of coal (ECOFABULOUS!) http://teenvogue.com/story/power-plant-burning-unwanted-hm-clothes
Or the $4.3 billion in dead stock H&M were sitting on in 2018. Imagine a 25% fine on that! That would absolutely encourage more responsible buying practices https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/business/hm-clothes-stock-sales.html
Or the $4.3 billion in dead stock H&M were sitting on in 2018. Imagine a 25% fine on that! That would absolutely encourage more responsible buying practices https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/business/hm-clothes-stock-sales.html
If it is a consumer levy, there are lots of ways to mitigate against the impact on low income families. Like VAT, it probably wouldn’t be imposed on children’s clothes, those being seen as more of a necessity than an indulgence (although fast children’s fashion is a problem too)
In any case, the fact is, what everyone's losing their minds about is a proposal in a plan to establish an action group to examine the potential for levies to curb the mindless mass consumerism that's destroying our planet & keeping millions of workers impoverished and enslaved.
Because the problem, as we know, isn't people on low incomes buying what they need, it's too many people buying too much stuff they don’t need. We have to recalibrate our relationship with fashion, for the sake of those who are paying the biggest price for our addiction to it.
Exploitation of people and planet is now as fundamental to the fast fashion model as generating the 25 top trends for spring, and while these waste action proposals won’t directly tackle the exploitation of garment workers, what they will do, especially if mirrored at EU level,
is address one area of bad practice, which genuinely could - by increasing consumer awareness through education, and perhaps regulating the labelling & marketing of fast fashion - feed greater responsibility and transparency into other areas, cleaning up the whole supply chain.
The plan contains meaningful proposals that will positively impact how we engage with textile consumption, but more importantly inject circular thinking into an industry that is causing untold social and environmental carnage in poorer countries. THIS CANNOT HAPPEN SOON ENOUGH.
Meantime, it’s worth remembering that NO ONE is entitled to benefit from the exploitation of workers, and the idea that social and environmental justice for the people who make our clothes and the people we dump them on can wait till we get our own house in order is WILD to me.
No one has a god-given right to a €7 pair of jeans if the woman who made them can’t feed or educate her kids, if the farmer who grew the cotton had his lungs poisoned by pesticides, or if a whole region has no clean water because of the chemical dyes pumped into their rivers.
If we’re going to start investigating ways to cut off the waste streams that pollute the environment and cripple indigenous industries in the world’s poorest countries, and clean up supply chains that rely on the exploitation of their land & their women, that’s a GOOD thing.
If the knock-on effect of that is that we curb our most excessive consumer impulses & start considering what we need vs what we want, that’s also a good thing. The rate at which we consume and the way fashion is marketed puts undue pressure on people of all incomes to buy more.
I understand people's concerns that ‘Green’ measures under this government are going to place an unfair burden on the less well off in our society. I understand and 100% support the need for a just transition. But the poorest people on our planet deserve a just transition too.
If the action group decides (in the medium - long term) a levy on cheap clothes is the instrument that addresses the impact of fast fashion, no one will shout louder or rail harder against that than me, because it will show a fundamental misunderstanding of where the problems lie
Until then, having seen first hand the damage this industry does, I can’t but support a plan that aims, in the short term, to lessen the impacts of this toxic industry on those who feel those impacts the hardest, and who live every day with the consequences of our choices.
