Over the past 5 years there has been a global lack of confidence that governments will make the necessary changes in legislation to start restoring the planet as we reach the tipping point. This is slowly starting to change as this year the EU has brought in legislation that potentially could start the ball rolling. The Anti-Waste for a Circular Economy legislation requires brands to back up any environmental claims with scientific evidence that’s been verified by a third party; "vague marketing around sustainability...could lead to fines or even legal action" (McKinsey & Company, 2022). The AGEC laws aim to “push companies towards more circular production and shoppers towards more responsible consumption habits” (Kent, 2023c).

Many of the EU claims are “vague” and “unfounded,” but what we can see is that all environmental claims must consider the full lifecycle of a product and that “self-certified environmental labels with no third-party verification or regular monitoring will be banned” (Kent, 2023b). This even comes down to not overemphasizing the benefits of recycled plastic in garments and putting warnings on swing tags stating that they will shed microfibres. Any climate related claims by brands must have substantiated evidence and indicate how much they are relying on offsets, not just footprint reduction. Penalties are not clear but could be at least 4% of annual turnover (Kent, 2023b).

The outcome is that fashion brands will need to have “greater command of their supply chains” and need to act now. They have to publish the country where they manufacture their garments, and where their core materials are processed (Kent, 2023c). Future legislation will eventually be introduced that raises the cost of outsourced goods and make domestic manufacturing more competitive and viable. "It costs more if you actually have pay and treat the people who make your clothes properly and respect the environment. It would improve the lives of all garment workers in the outsourced sector” (Environmental Audit Committee, 2019:51). By 2023, legislation is likely to make it compulsory that garments are recyclable. Current EU policy states that brands must have "separate textile-waste collections by 2025," although one of the current barriers to circularity is a lack of collection and sorting schemes.

Fashion brands are not ready and need time and money to improve supply-chain traceability and deliver on years-long commitments. The EU plan to bring in new regulations including product design requirements to improve durability. In the US, toxic chemicals used in garment manufacture are in the process of being banned; companies could be hit with fines at 2% of their global revenue (Kent, 2023c). The 2022 tax on virgin plastics is likely to soon be applied to garments containing “less than 50% recycled PET” and would result in recycled fibre market stimulation (Environmental Audit Committee, 2019 cited in Edwards, 2022). As the government brings in requirements to back up sustainability claims, "investment in tools to gather and manage supply chain data is likely to become more widespread" (McKinsey & Company, 2022). Big fashion players are protecting themselves; luxury world leader LVMH has hired Fairly Made to make necessary changes to anticipate the demands for more data and disclosure and stay on top of the changing landscape (Kent, 2023c). Fashion brands communication strategies should reflect their commitments to the circular economy, and they should try to work with "policymakers, industry bodies" like Re:GenZ to address their pain points regarding targets and their progress.

We asked four experts in the circular and sustainable fashion field what legislation they think needs to be introduced over the next five years.

Professor Natascha Radclyffe-Thomas

Professor of Marketing & Sustainable Business at British School of Fashion

I think for the UK having more things around extended producer responsibility would be good. I also think in terms of actually hitting big companies where it hurts. So looking at actually some of the taxation legislation would be a useful thing to look at as well in general because I mean, even within the fast fashion industry…I tend to think now it's so removed from being anything to do with fashion. It's just a way of extracting money. But within that, obviously there is money to be had. So I think things that a fair about redistribution of money and not letting people get around loopholes in terms of tax ownership and all sorts of things like offshoring. I mean, all of these things are connected in a big sense. So we need to have a root and branch of that as well. But then also, I think maybe some more positive legislation that's actually investing in systems, processes, people to make the sort of circular economy actually be able to work. It's a real shame because at the local level, we've seen various cities investing, cities…like Glasgow, for example, wanting to be a circular city. But then lots of those initiatives are getting stalled because as the local governments don't have any finances, they're having to cut lots of programmes around that. I actually think there's a bit that, you know about companies having to tell the truth about what they're doing, being responsible for what they're doing.

But then there's also investment in systems, processes and places that will enable that to happen. So even down to things around rates for online businesses because lots of the mass production and lots of the things that are problematic, like - I know we're seeing it stopping now, but having free shipping returns and those kinds of things all enabled because of unfair kind of tax and different systems would be good to see a bit of a rebalance with that. I mean, various people have talked about repairs and things. Actually investing to promote repairs and investing to promote the skills of repairing because I mean, in a sense, if everyone decided they wanted everything repaired tomorrow, there aren't the people or the materials systems to actually be able to repair things because they've been so under invested in. So I think it's a bit of a balance of legislation that's punitive, but then also legislation that supports getting to a better place. And that again, would have, you know education impacts, the fact that we've allowed things like making to be completely classed as skill less, is why people can be exploited as makers because that isn't…valued in any way. So it's quite a lot, I think we could we could do through legislation.

Jo-Anne Godden

Founder RubyMoon (the world’s only not for profit gym to swimwear company) and Circular Specialist & Mentor: Circular Product & Textiles Development & Design.

It really is legislation and tax that's going to drive this system change that we desperately need. I think also we need to get radical with this as well. We've got eight years to make a difference in climate change, but equally as life threatening to humans is biodiversity, which of course is linked to climate change, but is the destruction of our planet and our systems. We're going through destruction of biosystems. The planet that we live on is being destroyed. And if we don't get this right and don't put this radical system change as a priority and we do the wrong things now - we're in big trouble. About 12 months ago I had a meeting with a large UK based fast fashion company, mostly e-commerce. They walked me through some of their 2030 textile circular textile policy, which they thought was fabulous. But what they've actually adopted was what I call “circular light.” They have chosen the bits that fit in with their fast fashion model, right? So they've chosen the recycled textiles and they haven't looked at living wage or they haven't looked at actually reducing the number of garments they're going to import or how to make their garments better, more durable. You know, increasing their prices to make them more valuable or better made, they haven't considered any of that. So they are going to spend the next eight years pursuing a circular light model that's not going to make one iota of difference to bring in…true circularity into their business model. That's because the UK Government has no plans at this point to bring in any legislation that we can see clearly or a taxonomy of any kind or EPR. That was written a few years ago, our circular textile plan, but nothing has been implemented. Let’s face it, it’s not been implemented. Unless we get that these fast fashion companies will carry on exactly as they are right now. And my fear is actually the UK is going to get dumped on. So anything that can't be easily sorted or taken in Europe, will actually then just be dumped in the UK because it will be easier because there's no repercussions. And that's my biggest fear really.

Professor Natascha Radclyffe-Thomas

Professor of Marketing & Sustainable Business at British School of Fashion

I just wanted to add as well, that I think what's really difficult is there's lack of consistency in reporting as well. So a lot of businesses are saying that that's the big struggle for them…a lack of consistency in what's actually being reported on. So again, if there was legislation that made it a lot clearer what targets actually were and that the targets were more about the reducing impacts. If we're thinking about SDG 12, for example, then what does that actually mean? And then actually more forcing businesses to actually divulge…the different layers would be good as well. So at the moment we have some mandatory sort of climate related financial disclosures, etc.. And I think some of that in the UK because we have a lot of small and medium sized businesses, that's a real barrier for people to actually know what they're measuring and to be able to report it. So I think supporting that would be really helpful. We see some of the bigger companies being more proactive in terms of actually wanting to report against. And interestingly, lots of the not just to do with fashion, but lots of the FT top 350 companies are more interested in SDG 12. I mean, it might be for what Jo said that maybe they're picking off easy bits of responsible consumption and production and thinking, “well, we can address that if we do this.” But I think that would be helpful because otherwise it's…difficult to measure any achievements if we're not all looking towards the same sort of systems of what we're measuring. I think that would be really helpful.

Natalie Binns

Sustainable Fashion Consultant & Freelance Head of Buying

The other thing I would add is that I want to see consequences for businesses and brands. You know, we're doing a lot of things…even the green claims code. What's the actual consequence, though? I want it to hit that these businesses where it hurts and find them and see them actually have consequences from it. I feel like whatever legislation we bring in, there needs to be a process in place to actually monitor what they're doing and bring consequences for them not doing what they're saying. It's really interesting what you said, Jo, about the retailer who's doing the circular light, because I had a massive bee on my bonnet about a year ago…ASOS brought out a circular handbook and said, you know, this is our circular collection. It was things like this top is unisex. You can wear it more than one way. You know, how is that even allowed? I just I just don't even know how we legislate to stop that happening. For a while, I thought that we needed to legislate around the word sustainability; like you can't call something sustainable unless you can produce X, Y, and Z. You know who made it, where it where it was grown, where the raw materials came from or something. But then I just think that we get into a situation where how do we actually police that? I think certainly the EPR is the place to start; its responsibility from beginning to end, including end of life.

Rachel Sheila Kan

Fashion Circularity Specialist (Author & Troubleshooter at Circular Earth, Ecosystem Architect at The Ecosystem Incubator)

I think in general being very short sighted and very reactionary. We need to see this on a whole other plane. I don't think doing the same things that we've been trying to do for another 30 years is going to actually change the needle. I think we're going to have a little bit of a portion. We're going to have less fads. We need better than less fads, but we need to be on the positive side. So not that we're just going towards zero. We're going towards creating positive. Positivity and positive actions. To me, the theory of control is a part of the old system. I get it will move the needle in some respects. People will say like your reactionary, semi-sustainable, semi-circular stuff that you talk about Jo. That's why, because they are never pushed to be beneficiary, they are just pushed to be “okay, let's go towards zero” and they'll generally go “what's the low hanging fruit that I can do on that?” And there's only ever going to be a very small percentage that are going to go towards beneficiary or a 100% sustainable. There's no way we're going to get to what we need to get to a regenerative future without really looking and addressing the systems that we actually have here, the monetary system. The real reason why we're all having this conversation is that we're in this system where money is more important than anything else. For me, until we come out of that and realise that actually true wealth is the future of our world. When we actually measure our future success on that, I think we'll have an actual chance at doing this. I think, yes, the UK can go into the same taxonomy as the EU. Fantastic. Really great. But we need to be like 10xing that right now…using the language of the entrepreneurs that are out there right now, they're out there 10xing their money - we need to 10x our future.

So what is our hot take on this at Re:GenZ?

Our mission is to do the same for our fashion startups. We educate our clients marketing and legal teams so that they can better review and communicated circular economy strategies in a responsible way. We help them to collect data on their supply chain using the latest digital tools to “ensure better traceability along the value chain” and "to show a reduction in impact against a defined baseline;" making this accessible to their customers for transparency and trust building (McKinsey & Company, 2022). We also invest in "research and data intelligence" to gather "verified evidence to substantiate and credibly support sustainability claims — and share findings with stakeholders transparently" (McKinsey & Company, 2022). At Re:GenZ we are not just doing this as a tick box exercise, regenerating the planet through circular economy principles is our core mission.