Product Stewardship //
Clothing textile waste, myths, stewardship, and circularity By Omer Soker IT’S a myth that Winston Churchill once said ‘Never waste a good crisis’. It was President Barack Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel who coined the inventive phrase in response to the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. And what he meant is that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before. Fast forward to Australia in 2022. Make no mistake, sending 780,000 tonnes of textile waste to landfill every year is a very real and imminent crisis. And it’s a myth that Australia has anything near an end-of-life solution for clothing or the recycling infrastructure to tackle that volume. It’s no wonder clothing textiles have been added to The Minister’s Priority List, which identifies the products and materials considered to be most in need of a product stewardship approach. The Australian Government is sending a clear signal to the entire clothing textiles sector that it’s time for action and for industry to clean this up, and that taking responsibility for waste on this scale needs to be part of the cost of doing business. Concurrently, the government is also presenting a massive opportunity for the sector to come together in a coordinated action to create a vibrant, circular economy for clothing textiles. The government is presenting us an 38
opportunity to do things we thought we could not do before. To positively transform the sector and engage the next generation of customers demanding brand sustainability and confidence in downstream textile solutions. Let’s not waste it.
Clothing Textiles Product Stewardship Scheme The Australian Government has awarded the Australian Fashion Council-led consortium a $1 million grant to design, develop and implement a Product Stewardship Scheme for clothing textiles, along with a National Roadmap for Clothing in Australia. The consortium partners include Charitable Recycling Australia, WRAP, Sustainable Resource Use and QUT. Key collaborators such as the National Retail Association (NRA), Australian Retailers Association (ARA), Waste Management and Resource Recovery Association (WMRR) and Australian Council of Recycling (ACOR), and dozens of other stakeholders across the entire clothing value chain including brands, retailers, industry, academia and federal, state and local governments, are also involved. The stewardship scheme will be co-designed through consultation and collaboration to create a voluntary accredited, industry-led, self-supporting and economically sustainable scheme, covering
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all imported and domestically produced clothing. Far more than just an end-of-life program, the purpose of the scheme is to transform how clothing is made, used and recirculated in Australia to create clothing circularity by 2030. It will achieve this through the waste hierarchy’s R-strategies in not just reducing waste, but accelerating reuse, repair, refurbishment, remanufacture, repurposing, recycling and recovery. The scheme will bring together all clothing ‘Stewards’ (organisations that place clothing products onto the market) and ‘Recirculators’ (organisations operating in R-strategies). They will create the new investment fund Australia needs for substantial infrastructure and commercial support to find the highest value and best use for clothing textiles across the entire supply chain. With its focus on a shift to circular economy principles, the scheme will address: • Design and production – incentivised design practices, support to adopt circular economy principles, and industry-set Australian targets. • Consumption, use and disposal – promotion of durability of use, reuse, repair and responsible disposal through behaviour change campaigns and upholding consumer confidence.
Charitable Recycling Australia’s Omer Soker.
• E nd-of-life and recirculation – pathways to recirculate clothing, fibres and materials with investment in commercial-scale collection, sorting and recycling infrastructure. With collaborative engagement with all clothing stakeholders, success is defined by the creation of an industry-led, self-sustaining scheme by March 2023, and the establishment of an independent Product Stewardship Organisation governed by a board, charter and members with oversight on all funding and investment decisions required. This is a rare and exceptional opportunity for all clothing textile stakeholders to come together under a co-ordinated plan for the future of clothing textiles in Australia.
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