FASHION REVOLUTION | FASHION TRANSPARENCY INDEX 2021
VIEWPOINTS
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VIEWPOINT: A LACK OF TRANSPARENCY FROM MAJOR BRANDS ON OVERPRODUCTION, CIRCULARITY AND THE SECOND-HAND CLOTHING TRADE
LIZ RICKETTS CO-FOUNDER AND DIRECTOR OF THE OR FOUNDATION
The first thing that stands out to me is that more brands offer clothing take-back programs than repair programs. This isn’t indicative of aligning with true principles of circularity and sustainability which would require companies and citizens alike to take responsibility for their products. Instead, these statistics show that the vast majority of big fashion brands are simply passing on the responsibility for the products they create and more generally evading accountability for the overconsumption patterns that they actively incentivise and normalise.
Most brands’ take-back programs simply divert clothing from local communities and ship it off to second-hand markets in the Global South, where we know much of the clothing ends up in landfills, burnt or swept out to sea. The oversupply of second-hand goods also undermines indigenous sustainability logic and teaches citizens that clothing is disposable thereby seeding linear behaviours in communities that have long resisted the lure of disposability culture. Without further commitments to repair, upcycling, designing for durability and capping production volumes, takeback programs do not require that brands take responsibility for the waste they create. These brands confuse the public by marketing their take-back programs as “recycling” or “circular” while also rewarding customers with incentives to buy more new goods. This is counterproductive and leaves consumers with misguided notions about the state of textile “recycling”.
Furthermore, because most brands work with third parties such as I:Co and Soex to implement these take-back programs, they fail to create a feedback loop between the post-consumer waste stream and their design teams, missing valuable opportunities to assess wear patterns and to design for durability, repair and upcycling. This is further evidenced by the fact that only 3% of brands, that’s just 8 companies out of 250 surveyed, disclosed the percent of products that are designed for the circular economy. Until these brands stop overproducing and are accountable to the communities that truly care for their waste, these take-back programs simply export waste to the Global South thereby extending the linear economy, not truly closing the loop. From 2020 to 2021, only 9 more brands made efforts to disclose the quantity of clothing that they produce, bringing the total to 33 brands or 13% of those surveyed. Yet this is a number that every brand will know. Every company in the world knows how many products it manufactures, so
there is really no excuse for not disclosing this information. It speaks volumes to the fact that brands are afraid this will reveal their true impact on the planet and undermine the greenwashing claims that are made in their marketing campaigns. Publishing data on the number of items would also force brands to confront the fact that supply and demand is not as straightforward as they claim. Brands intentionally overproduce because they cannot predict what people will buy and yet these same brands often claim that they only produce based on demand. This myth that supply and demand are neutral forces has been carried forward into the second-hand trade with brands suggesting that they only export what people in the Global South demand. If this were true then 40% of the clothing that flows through Kantamanto market in Ghana, where my work is based, would not go to waste. Disclosing production volumes would not only allow for more honest dialogue, but it would lead to more meaningful innovation across the value chain.
