by Peter Knight | Jun 22, 2020 | Blog
Credit: SophieB
What can glam sustainable fashion learn from the dowdy packaging industry? Quite a lot.
Fashion is our personal packaging. Much like the wrappings around consumer goods, clothes help us control our temperature, keep us safe and signal our personal style (or lack of it).
Packaging came under sustainability scrutiny long before we started to worry about the social and environmental issues of fashion. Both industries have become obsessed with circularity as a cure for their rampant use of natural resources and consequential waste.
We should celebrate fashion’s commitment to find solutions. Its challenges are many and highly complex. The sector is supported by an ever-expanding ecosystem made up of pressure groups, technical innovators and the more enlightened fashion houses who are looking to adapt or revolutionise their business models in a quest for sustainability and prosperity.
What’s more, recycled packaging – especially used PET beverage bottles – is a valuable raw material increasingly used by fashion houses.
Here are three quick lessons for fashion, from the sustainably-challenged consumer packaging sector.
1. Circularity is very hard to do
The invention of disposables in the 1960s created great opportunities for brands to offer unprecedented convenience for consumers, avoid the cost of returnables and develop myriad branding opportunities − all resulting in a cumulative, global avalanche of waste that continues to foul our lives 60 years later.
Public concern about packaging waste led in the 1970/80s to policy initiatives ranging from anti-litter campaigns to the “producer pays principle” where brand owners had to fund the collection and recycling of the resulting waste. Since then there has been much discussion about recyclability but little action on recycling – other than exporting the waste to poorer nations for them to extract the (minimal) value and chuck the rest away. This led to the glorious euphemism of plastic waste “leaking” into the environment.
Some progress has been made with recycling metals, but even with the aluminium lobbyists proudly claiming a 75% recycling rate in Europe, little is said about the elusive 25% that is lost.
While technically feasible, the much-vaunted circular economy for plastic is still very much a dream. Or rather, a nightmare – visit any unmanaged beach anywhere in the world to witness the failure of the circular plastics economy.
Lesson for fashion:
If we’re incapable of recycling our plastic – easy to collect, easy to sort, easy to reformulate – what hope is there to do the same for clothes whose mix of fabrics, threads, buttons, studs and zips make the multi-layered aseptic cartons and plastic films seem remarkably simple? Technology alone will not solve the problem. Intelligent public policy is needed to ensure that expanding networks of used-clothes collectors actually recycle the fabrics. And as we have learned from plastics, market stimulation is needed to ensure used clothes have a value greater than rags.
Bottom line:
The fashion industry has a great opportunity to get it right. It must spend more time and greater energy lobbying for pro-sustainability public policies to ensure circular innovations deliver the promised results. And everyone should understand that these policies come with a cost that must be borne by someone other than the environment.
2. People matter too
Fashion and packaging industries support highly vulnerable people. It is estimated that up to 75 million people are employed in the textile, clothing and footwear industry. The millions who do the farming, harvesting, dying, cutting and sewing live largely at the margins of society and are, on the whole, poorly paid. Some more enlightened fashion houses pay above the minimum wage for garment workers which in Bangladesh, for example, is US$ 105 per month.
It’s a lot worse for informal waste pickers who are essential to mop up the “leakage” of disposable packaging. From the streets of New York City and throughout Africa and Asia, you see them carrying large bags of plastic and metal. With the collapse of the oil price, the value of used plastic has all but evaporated, along with the measly incomes of pickers.
Advocates of the circular economy are obsessed with the technical opportunities and conveniently forget about the people who will suffer most from major structural adjustments in the fashion industry. Small changes to well-established systems, such as employment in the garment industry, can have devastating impacts on the livelihoods of poor people who depend on fashion’s jobs. This has been demonstrated by the contraction of the fashion industry badly hit by Covid-19, leaving millions of garment workers without an income.
It would be a pyrrhic victory if circularity, with its engineering-centric view of the world, led to greater poverty.
Lessons for fashion:
Sustainability challenges may have a technical hue, but they are fundamentally political in nature. Sympathetic public policy makers should be encouraged to find solutions that maintain and grow fairly-paid jobs in fashion while accommodating the changes that circularity will bring.
Bottom line:
Stories of circularity are cool, but in the end it is people who matter most. The good news is that the good actors in fashion agree and are working to ensure fair jobs and respect for human rights.
3. Darnin & Mendin will not make you rich
Simple packaging is remarkably complex, like clothes. Some packaging is pure genius. Think of the plastic fizzy drinks bottle: paper thin but it can withstand high pressures and tumbling about on trucks while keeping its sparkle for us. We drink thirstily from a miracle of modern engineering, and then – and then – we chuck the bottle away! Extraordinary behaviour, but that’s the system we’ve got.
Clothes are the same: cleverly designed, made from fabulous fabric, expertly crafted and, increasingly, worn once to a party and never again. We may not dispose of our clothes as quickly as a drinks bottle, but we’re getting close because clothes are dirt cheap.
Yes, some clothes can be mended and special pieces can be re-commerced. In the sustainable-fashion conversation there is much chatter about mending, darning, and celebrating the enduring value of well-made clothes. But let’s not kid ourselves about the scalability of this minority, granny-like activity. Darnin & Mendin is great for some, but the practices of yesteryear will never make a scalable, profitable business model for tomorrow.
The packaging industry is often asked to return to the good old days of heavy, reusable bottles. Advocates for re-useable containers see the past as a way forward despite blinding evidence that the environmental costs of washing, sterilising and transporting heavy containers far outweigh the benefits. The same applies to darning and mending.
Lessons for fashion:
Nostalgia will not lead to circularity.
Bottom line:
Look forward for solutions, not back.
Final takeaway
If there is one takeaway for the fashion industry it is this: get radical. Some influential and enlightened players in the industry are genuinely committed to sustainability because they know it’s critical to future of their business. But as the packaging sector has demonstrated, technology alone will not solve your problems.
The fashion industry needs to be less shy about its role in public policy. Enlightened actors need to up their advocacy and get governments to promote policies that encourage sustainable solutions for all.
To everyone’s cost, brand owners and the packaging industry have shown us the dire consequences of weak, ill-conceived policies that create unintended consequences.
Ask any turtle with a straw up its nose.
by Simon Propper | Nov 7, 2018 | Blog
SustainPack, the Barcelona packaging sustainability conference, left me in no doubt that the packaging industry is in crisis – and in the words of glam-rock legends The Sweet, “we just haven’t got a clue what to do”. The industry, especially the plastic sector is encircled by problems:
The revelation
The first rumblings came in February 2015, when Science Magazine published a paper by Jenna Jambeck et al, “Plastic waste inputs from land into the ocean”. Prior to this nobody I knew, could explain how so much plastic was swirling around in the oceans – or if they could, they kept quiet about it. Jambeck and her team identified specific Asian rivers as the source of most of the world’s ocean plastic. It didn’t take long to wonder how a poor country like Indonesia could conceivably be the world’s second biggest ocean plastic polluter.
As usual the problem was revealed to be us in the West. Turns out when we ‘recycle’ our Coke Zero bottle, we actually mean we stick it on a boat full of mixed plastic trash to Asia. And to hell with it, let them comb through the mountain of single use plastic waste we all generate in a typical year of guilt free consumption. Surely there are offshore elves grateful to sift through our trash to farm what meagre scraps they may. This is 21st century imperialism.
Boats tend to dock near rivers. Transport is expensive. So the waste gets crudely sorted in primitive sites right by the river. What to do with the left-over stuff? You guessed it. This is the system behind a big lie told to our consumers, who thought at least they were doing one good deed when they drop the ubiquitous single-use plastic pack into the recycling. China finally got sick of being the dumping ground for our poorly sorted packaging waste, and legislated to end the trade on 31st December 2017. According to an excellent in depth investigation by the UK Financial Times, China and Hong Kong went from accepting 60% of G7 countries’ waste plastic in the first half of 2017, to just 10% in the same period in 2018.
Right now mountains of the dirty stuff are piling up in warehouses while local governments scramble for somewhere to process it. Having promised their electorate they were recycling, they can hardly send it to landfill without risk of criticism – and landfill is expensive anyway. The problem is that neither Europe nor the U.S. has anything like the capacity and logistics infrastructure to recycle their own waste material. So they are looking for poorer Asian countries to fill the void left by China, according to the FT including, Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia. This is hardly a reassuring option from an environmental perspective.
The outrage
Of course the readership of Science Magazine is limited, and probably nobody would know about this fiasco if David Attenborough had not been so alarmed by the quantity of plastic his film crews saw in the oceans while making the BBC’s Blue Planet II. The renowned naturalist and filmmaker had previously avoided addressing environmental issues, but became so concerned about the damage to marine life and the eco-system, that he broke with policy and made a strong appeal to solve the problem. His images of sea life trapped, suffocated and poisoned by ocean plastic shocked the public, changing the perception of plastic packaging fundamentally. I’m struggling to think of a material that is this universally unpopular. Environmentalists hate coal – but it’s a long time since anyone personally bought some and unpacked it on their kitchen counter.
Plastic packaging is personal. It protects and presents most of our favorite things. Now we look at it in our recycling bin, and wonder, which whale’s stomach it will end up inside.
The media were rightly outraged, and none does outrage quite as well at the UK tabloid papers. In the summer of 2018, supermarkets were vilified for their excess packaging and failure to ensure it was being recycled. Under intense pressure, some quickly caved in, hurriedly announcing recyclable packaging targets and banning black plastic trays. Panic measures rarely make for good strategy.
The regulator
Enter the EU, the custodian of the consumption habits of half a billion people in 28 countries thought it should rush through a directive on packaging before its next round of elections in May 2019. For two decades the EU has claimed to be solving the packaging recycling issue with their Extended Producer Responsibility policy, that transfers the cost from local authority to producer. Although this has stimulated more recycling infrastructure than say in the U.S., a significant proportion of waste is still put on the boat. An immediate ban on coffee stirrers and straws looks more like PR than Producer Responsibility. As the French say “quand les poules aurons des dents” (when chicken grow teeth).
The EU has been caught with its eco-pants down. For decades leading European companies and many of its regions and cities have kept a packaging secret, “pssst when we say recycle, we mean boat to China”. Of course, there are exceptions and quite a lot of recovered packaging is recycled and burned within the EU. But by no means all of it. According to the Financial Times, Germany is the world’s third biggest exporter of waste plastic (after the U.S. and Japan).
NGOs of all complexions have dived-in to stir the gyre. Most influential is the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which has done an impressive job of promoting a ‘circular economy’ – where materials remain in use indefinitely, returning each cycle into a product at least as valuable as the last. One corporate presenter at SustainPac even gave MacArthur equal status with the EU in a slide on influencers.
In partnership with packaging NGOs the organization has signed up leading consumer brands to set targets for redesigning their packaging and facilitating the recovery and reuse of the materials. If there is a bright spot in this sorry tale, this may be it. But treat with caution. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation receives most of its funding from corporations. They are masters of the dark art of ‘stakeholder sedation’. It goes like this: sign up to long term goals, pay the fees, populate the committees, control the agenda. This is why Greenpeace doesn’t accept corporate funding.
MacArthur describes the commitments of her plastic partner corporations as a “line in the sand”. These are the commitments:
- Eliminate problematic or unnecessary plastic packaging and move from single-use to reuse packaging models
- Innovate to ensure 100% of plastic packaging can be easily and safely reused, recycled, or composted by 2025
- Circulate the plastic produced, by significantly increasing the amounts of plastics reused or recycled and made into new packaging or products
In fact almost anything anyone has to say about the future of plastic packaging is ‘by 2025’. ‘Kicking the can down the road’? Sorry couldn’t resist it. Less collaborative NGOs adopted the well-versed name and shame tactic, publishing a ranking of the world’s biggest ocean polluters. Not a place you want your brand to appear.
Here at the Barcelona conference, the packaging industry is visibly buckling under the stress. The non-plastic materials lobby are rushing around telling everyone who’ll listen that the issue is just a plastic problem. The paper and metal packaging makers are reveling in plastic’s discomfort. But their customers, the major brands and supermarkets, most definitely are not.
They need to find solutions, quickly, and an inter-materials PR war is the last thing they want to spend their time on. They need plastic packaging – we all do. Paper, card, and metal cans all bring issues of their own. Chicken fillets in a paper bag anyone?
The solution
Nobody knows. Not the EU, not the corporations and not even the NGOs, although they usually think they do. The EU regulation will lean towards the ‘Producer Responsibility’ levy (euphemism for tax). New taxes are a non-starter in the U.S. where a different mechanism will have to be devised to fund a national reprocessing capability.
Key to circular economics, is the size of the market for recycled material. More expensive to produce than virgin plastic, and less desirable as a material – contamination is an issue – recycled materials need an eco-boost. This will push and pull the unloved material into our lives: cash from the producer responsibility levy to fund the processing, and more cash from brands compelled by legislation to incorporate recycled material in their packs. It might be called producer responsibility, but don’t be fooled, it’s the consumer who will pay.
There are big opportunities for the material and design innovators to invent new ways of using recycled materials in packaging, without compromising product protection. Other circular packaging R&D areas are:
- Single polymer packaging design (don’t mix plastic types)
- Cleaner, purer recycled materials
- Design innovation to incorporate recycled materials safely in food and personal products
- Bio-plastics from crops and organic wastes
- Bio-degradable plastics
- Ocean and beach recovered plastic
If you think all of this is a mess, you’re right. But change often is messy, and we should take heart that Jambeck and Attenborough have brought this out in the open. That of course is a long way from reaching a solution as Hansen and Gore will attest.
