Getting ready for a wrap-around
The Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) has launched Textiles 2030, a ten-year programme for clothing and textiles that seeks to slash the environmental impact of UK clothing and home fabrics through practical interventions along the entire textiles chain. Textiles 2030 has secured commitment from 17 major brands and retailers, 26 re-use/recycling organisations and 20 affiliates. Textiles 2030 is supported by more than half the UK market at launch, with 60 per cent of clothing placed on the market (by sales volume) by UK retailers coming under the agreement. WRAP's Head of Business Collaboration, David Moon, speaks about the ambitious plan in this freewheeling interview with Subir Ghosh.
What was at the back of your mind when you / your organisation thought of 2030 as the benchmark/cutoff for this project?
We have run voluntary agreements of this sort where you have clear targets, you measure, you track progress, and you collaborate to develop the good practice. Some of them have been as short as three years-wherein you have a very near-term goal, and you have a lot of focus. Some have gone up to ten years, and it's a trade-off. The shorter the period, the more the people can see a clear goal that they work towards. The advantage of a longer-term goal, particularly where you are trying to overcome major barriers and you need a whole system change, you need to allow time for things like developing the evidence, developing the good practice, running some pilots, starting to scale it up to get the larger scale investments in place. So, in order to pursue real ambition, you need a period of-say-at least five years or more like ten years to deliver change at a national scale. If it is something simpler like we are all going to reduce packaging in our own business, then a shorter three-year goal can work effectively.
The use-and-throw culture is not specific to the UK, but is a global problem. For Textiles 2030 to work, brands, retailers and manufacturers, all have a role to play. But the problem with fashion is that it's a lifestyle problem. So, there have to be changes at the far end of the spectrum as well (consumers/customers). Do you plan to engage common people in this project?
There are two aspects to that. One thing we will definitely do is the consumer research that will enable us to help businesses to engage their customers-understanding things like the acceptance of alternative business models, like the reuse business models. The businesses themselves have got large marketing budgets, and if they are using consistent and well-informed messages to reach their customers that is an effective way of achieving change. WRAP, in other areas, does do direct-to consumer messaging and campaigning.
For example, we work in the UK to help reduce household food waste and we run campaigns. We have a brand called Love Food, Hate Waste. We do direct-to- consumer campaigns through the media, social media. So, it is a question of the scale at which we ourselves can do direct campaign delivery; it depends on the funding that we attract for that work. But certainly, a more cost effective route for us is to make sure that we develop the behavioural change interventions and the messages. Then the signatories roll those out.
The industry itself is so global in nature. Do you think that the Textiles 2030 project will end up having a bigger impact beyond the shores of the UK?
Yes, we are planning to do so. While the SCAP was for the UK only-and it was one of its kind, what we're working towards with Textiles 2030 is for it to be a trailblazer or an exemplar of how voluntary agreements can be used at the national level in other countries. We already have funding from the Laudes Foundation to develop another pilot which we plan to launch in Denmark sometime this summer. It will again demonstrate how you can build a collaboration to develop a circular approach to clothing. We are currently developing that agreement. If you look at our work on plastic packaging, the UK Plastics Pact which we launched in March-April 2018, was the first of its kind in terms of national plastics pacts. There are now-I think-about a dozen plastic pacts around the world. There are discussions currently under way towards having a plastics pact in India to be launched later this year. There are plastics pacts in Africa. Then, there's one covering the whole of Europe, one in North America. That is an example where we worked on the evidence base. We had the track record, the experience of making voluntary agreements work, and we launched the world's first plastics pact. That's providing something of a blueprint for other countries to adopt and we are supporting partners in other countries who are delivering plastics pacts. We're looking at what's the potential to do something similar for textiles.
It's a global problem, the solutions are likely to have strong similarities whichever country you're looking at. If you want to get real action on the ground, then acting at the national level makes a lot of sense. You can have big global commitments, but they are not necessarily followed through unless you get a real implementation structure on the ground. If you work at the national level, you have more chances of really delivering against the targets. You can get the national businesses together, you can align the national policies to be supportive. So, the UK and Denmark in a sense are pilots or exemplars, but with the potential that other countries will pick up the same approach and that is a way that we could have greater impact worldwide.
The earlier programme was the Sustainable Clothing Action Plan (SCAP) which ended in 2020. I guess this (Textiles 2030) is an evolution of the earlier project. Could you elaborate?
Yes, it is building on that platform, but it's going a lot further-it's a lot more ambitious. I had played a leading role in setting up the SCAP back in 2012-13. What we did at that time was take the evidence of the significant environmental impacts of the clothing sector. We had evidence of what were the top things that you could do to start reducing some of the impacts. And we said-right, we think we can convert all this evidence into a commitment and get businesses to act on the evidence.
There are two major aspects of the SCAP on which we will build.
One is that we will develop the approach to measurement-in particular, having a robust and yet practical way of saying to a business (who's a signatory) that they can assess the total carbon (emissions), water and waste footprint of the whole set of clothing that they place on the market. What we can establish are also the top things that will help them deliver a reduction. That measurement is a key to action and that's what we had established through the SCAP earlier, and will now be further developing that footprint calculator tool to use in Textiles 2030.
The second element of the SCAP was the focus on more sustainable forms of fibres. I think this is one of the easier approaches to more sustainable textiles-because if half your clothing portfolio is cotton, and you can just switch over to Better Cotton Initiative (BCI) or Cotton made in Africa (CmiA) or Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS) cotton, then I guess for businesses it's a relatively easy thing to do. It doesn't require that their customers should make a particularly conscious change, but nevertheless it can deliver a significant reduction in the environmental footprint. That's what we saw in the SCAP. The signatories made tremendous progress in changing their fibre selection, particularly to more sustainable forms of cotton. So, that was the low-hanging fruit.
But, in Textiles 2030 we have to tackle some of the harder stuff, starting from the point that the textiles sector needs to play its part in climate change. We have a very ambitious target of halving the greenhouse gas (GHG) footprint of products placed on the market in ten years. I was listening on the radio this morning (April 22) and there was a clip where US President Joe Biden was again talking about halving carbon in 10 years. That's the sort of pace of progress that we need, but it won't be easy.
If the sector is going to achieve that, it will need not only more sustainable fibres, but also low carbon energy and it will need to move towards a more circular use of textile products and materials. It's circularity which is the challenging bit, because it requires a whole system change. If you just want to change your fibres, it's easy. You can stipulate it right: I'm going to use recycled polyester or BCI cotton. It's a decision of the retailer or brand that they can pass down on to their suppliers. But if you're looking at having a completely circular system-whether it's just more circular use of clothing- you need the retailers to be involved, you need the customers involved, you need the people who collect the clothing involved; or, if you are going to reprocess textiles back into fibres again, you need the whole collection, reprocessing, spinning, weaving, clothing, production cycle to change. That's why we see Textiles 2030 as being more ambitious than its predecessor.
You mentioned measurements, metrics, etc. But all these brands, retailers and manufacturers would really need to push themselves as well and it's just not a question of a mindset change. They would also need to make a lot of investment in terms of changes in technology, etc.
Yes, there will need to be a significant investment. One area of policy development in the UK that the government recently announced in its waste prevention programme is the move towards a policy on extended producer responsibility (EPR) wherein the producers pay the costs of recycling. In the UK this is already being fast-tracked for packaging, and the government has said that it would also look at EPR for some other sectors. It's clear that that they have now decided that textiles is a priority, and so they have said that they are going to fasttrack the policy consultation on EPR for textiles. We perceive that this is going to be an important way of getting money into the system to pay for recycling and in particular-potentially-into closed loop recycling. I anticipate that it will take policy nudges such as EPR in order to get the right level of investment.
You spoke about implementation, which kind of brings me to twin questions of transparency and green washing. How do you plan to eliminate these potential problems?
What we are including in the requirements on signatories in Textiles 2030 is that they work towards having a good visibility of their supply chain. They need visibility, because if they're going to engage with their suppliers to achieve environmental improvements, they need that visibility. It also links across to the aspect of the sort of social and ethical good practice in the textiles sector. Now, Textiles 2030 isn't directly trying to drive good practice on social and ethical aspects because there are already other initiatives in the UK-for example, the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI)-that are working in this space. But you're absolutely right that we don't want people to be greenwashing or freeriding. We don't want people to be saying 'oh, I am being good environmentally' and yet failing in their duty on social and ethical aspects. What we would be expecting is that suppliers in particular work to develop visibility of their supply chain which in turn can be a precursor to more public transparency. But the first thing I would say is the visibility.
In our voluntary agreements, we have a systematic process of engaging with our signatories on a scheduled basis to look at what are their action plans towards the voluntary agreement targets and review with them the progress they're making-so that you know if they aren't making progress, we can hold them to account and ultimately we could remove them from a voluntary agreement. That is, if they do not demonstrate that they are taking it seriously, and if they're not measuring, and if they're not making progress.
Do you foresee the Textiles 2030 project having a cascading effect on global supply chains too?
I recognise that the UK is only a small fraction of the global textiles market, and therefore on its own I suspect that the influence will be limited. The sort of influence that I foresee include increasing business interest in talking to suppliers about, particularly, the use of low-carbon forms of energy.
I can foresee retailers and brands having further dialogues with their suppliers about the use of energy in the supply chain. I would link this to the pressure that is coming from investors where they expect businesses to be aware of their climate-related risks and their scope-3 emissions-the emissions associated with the supply of the products they sell. [Scope 3 emissions are the result of activities from assets not owned or controlled by the reporting organisation, but that the organisation indirectly impacts in its value chain.] For example, we have seen BlackRock, the world's biggest investment manager, regularly ramping up the rhetoric in terms of their expectations from businesses.
In the UK, the Chancellor of the Exchequer has said that the UK will introduce regulations around climate-related financial disclosures. So, companies will have to report annually what risks they're facing and what mitigation actions they are taking. So, you would see from the UK and also other countries affected by the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD)-that big businesses will increasingly be going to suppliers to discuss what their carbon emissions are and what can be done to reduce them. That would be on top of my list as the most likely influence. Subsequently, you may get into more discussions around supplying fibres with recycled content.
What do you think would be the kind of investments that brands, retailers, manufacturers, among others would need to make-because they would need to go the whole hog right now?
I can see them working with their supply chains to make the investment. I was talking to one major retailer recently. They are interested in closed loop recycling of textile fibres and they've already been working with the people who can take the used clothing which they already collect, and also the people who can supply recycled fibres and are trying to work together on a pilot scale at the moment to support making this happen. I think they recognise that in the long term the current model of take, make, and throw away isn't sustainable, and so they have decided to put some money in to their suppliers so as to test out how the technology works. You can see that in some of the other investments in chemical recycling of fibres, you are starting to see some of the big companies putting money into the technology businesses (such as Worn Again Technologies). H&M have got going a pilot (project) on a small-scale chemical recycling plant. You would see some of the biggest brands that are far-sighted, (now) knowing that they need to invest.
