[OKRA] Mounting Clothing Waste Problem and potential EPR Programs for textile recycling

[Ellen Bussert]

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Fast Fashion is more harmful than you may think! Check out this article
below to learn more about the world's growing issue with clothing/textile
waste!

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Regulators in the US and Europe are waking up to the mounting clothing
waste problem that’s clogging local landfills and overwhelming countries
such as Ghana and Chile. Increasingly, they’re asking brands to pay for
it. Under rules that have been separately proposed in California, New
York, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Italy — and are also under discussion in
the UK and EU — fashion companies would have to fund textile recycling
programs, in most cases by paying for the volume of clothing they produce.
These “extended producer responsibility” (EPR) schemes, modeled after
programs for other hard-to-recycle goods such as batteries, mattresses and
medical sharps, require brands to pay fees based on their product output,
or to set up their own recycling programs.

Fashion industry waste is a growing and largely unchecked problem. In the
EU, textile waste totals about 4 million tons each year, while in the US
it hit 17 million tons in 2018, up 80% over 2000. Garments that don’t end
up in local landfills are often shipped in bulk to countries in the Global
South. In Ghana, as many as 15 million discarded garments arrive every
week, according to the Or Foundation, which advocates for fashion waste
reform.

EPR regulations aim to make fashion brands part of the solution. “It’s
forcing businesses to consider their footprint and getting them to think
top to bottom and ask themselves, ‘How much do we need to be producing and
how do we make sure we don’t have to pay for it on the backend?’” said
Betina Baumgarten, a fashion law attorney and consultant at Fashion CUTS.


*To read the full story,
visit https://fortune.com/2023/05/30/fashion-waste-recycling-programs-epr-proposed-laws/
<https://fortune.com/2023/05/30/fashion-waste-recycling-programs-epr-proposed-laws/>.Authors:
Olivia Rockeman and Bloomberg, FortunePhoto by Artificial Photography
on Unsplash
<https://unsplash.com/photos/vB5qtt8X4NA?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText>*
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