California Made Producers Responsible; Now Someone Has to Make It Work

The growth of textile waste has rarely been framed as a governance failure. It has been treated, instead, as an unfortunate byproduct of modern consumption—regrettable in scale, but structurally inevitable. That framing obscured something more precise: the absence of any actor within the supply chain who was formally responsible for managing a garment once it left the retail economy.

The numbers that resulted from that absence are stark. Across the United States, an estimated 85% of used textiles discarded by consumers ends up in landfill or combusted for energy recovery—the equivalent, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), of one truck-load of textiles burned or buried every second. The remaining 15% is captured by the secondhand textiles industry through a fragmented network of collection bins, thrift stores, retail take-back programmes, and mail-back services. That 15% is not evidence of a system working. Rather, it is what survives in the absence of one.

In fact, California's own figures sit within that broader pattern. The 1.2 million tonnes landfilled annually by the state did not accumulate because consumers were indifferent to waste. It accumulated because the infrastructure to divert those materials was chronically underdeveloped, unevenly distributed, and financially unsupported. Mattias Wallander, CEO of USAgain, puts the diagnosis thus: "The economics of textile recovery can only work if there is convenient, well-distributed collection and enough downstream capacity to sort, grade, and move textiles into viable end markets." None of those conditions currently exist at the scale the problem demands.

That void has a specific economic character. Municipal waste systems absorbed textile disposal without any mechanism to recover the material value embedded in discarded clothing. The $99 million annual landfill cost borne by California's local governments is only part of the reckoning. The same habit of disposal also represents, according to the study, a lost opportunity to support over 10,000 additional California jobs within a functioning circular economy for textiles.

The failure is not traceable to any single cause—bad infrastructure, weak policy, and unworkable economics each made the others worse. The report makes it clear that each failure has compounded others, creating a gap that no single intervention within the existing system could have closed.

The mismatch between industrial-scale clothing production and weak recovery systems is not incidental. Global clothing output has accelerated sharply over recent decades, driven by the fast fashion model's logic of rapid turnover and low unit cost. Recovery infrastructure, meanwhile, remained fragmented—concentrated near major metropolitan areas, dependent on voluntary consumer behaviour, and structurally disconnected from the production cycle that generates the waste in the first place.

In California, the collector network is clustered heavily around San Francisco and Los Angeles, leaving significant portions of the state with limited or no access to textile collection services.

Seen this way, SB 707 is less an environmental regulation than a belated invoice—sent, at last, to the industry that generated the problem and spent decades watching someone else clean it up.

California's textile EPR framework does not nudge the fashion industry toward better behaviour. Instead, it makes producers legally and financially accountable for what happens to their products after a consumer is done with them—something no US textile law has done before. That shift—from voluntary stewardship to mandated lifecycle responsibility—is the structural core of SB 707, and its implications extend well beyond waste management.

The mechanism the law deploys is precise. Every producer selling covered textile products in California must join a CalRecycle-approved PRO, which assumes collective responsibility for designing and operating statewide recovery programmes. The scope of coverage is deliberately broad, extending across apparel, footwear, accessories, and household textiles—product categories that together account for the full breadth of California's landfilled textile stream. Producers who fail to participate face civil penalties of up to $50,000 per day, a provision that converts regulatory compliance from an aspirational standard into an enforceable obligation.

The PRO's responsibilities are substantive rather than administrative. It must conduct an initial statewide needs assessment—due with CalRecycle by March 2027—evaluating what investments are required across collection, sorting, repair, reuse, and recycling. It must then develop a comprehensive plan that establishes collection site requirements, performance targets, an eco-modulated fee structure, and an education and outreach programme.

That fee structure is particularly significant: producers whose materials are harder to manage or recycle will pay proportionally higher fees, creating a direct financial incentive to reconsider material choices and product design before garments ever reach the market. Julie Cerenzia, Director at Cascadia Consulting Group, notes that "well-calibrated eco-modulation" will be essential to shifting producer behaviour and design choices toward increased durability, reparability, and recyclability—rather than merely reallocating the costs of disposal.

The law's full implementation timeline extends to July 2028 at the earliest, with PRO formation currently under way following an application deadline of January 2026. That phasing reflects the complexity of what is being built. What SB 707 requires is not simply the expansion of existing collection channels but the construction of a recovery architecture that previously did not exist—one that must integrate thrift organisations, commercial collectors, sorters, and reuse markets into a coherent, funded, and accountable system operating across a state of nearly 40 million people.

If the incentive structure works as designed, its effects will reach back through the supply chain into decisions that brands have, until now, made without any financial stake in what happens at the end. EPR funding of a diverse ecosystem of collectors, sorters, and recyclers is the mechanism that makes the conditions for viable recovery financially achievable. By internalising disposal costs within the industry through the PRO structure, the law introduces pressure—still prospective, but structurally embedded—for producers to factor end-of-life consequences into decisions about material sourcing, product construction, and supply-chain design.

Whether that pressure translates into genuine design change, or remains confined to fee payment, will depend significantly on how the needs assessment and PRO Plan are constructed over the next two years of rulemaking. The law exists. Building something that actually works is a different matter.

Passing the law was the straightforward part, as one notices now. California still has to build the infrastructure that gives it meaning—the collection sites, sorting capacity, and downstream markets without which the legislation is largely theoretical. That’s no easy task.

The collection challenge alone is considerable. The California Textiles EPR Study estimates that approximately 1,500 additional collection sites may be required to meet SB 707's convenience thresholds across the state. Wallander is unambiguous about what that number represents in operational terms: "It is not simply 'adding bins'. It requires predictable rules for placement and maintenance, and logistics and processing capacity to handle the added volumes responsibly."

The proposed recovery channels—public collection bins, retail drop-off locations, curbside programmes, and mail-back systems—each carry different cost profiles, contamination risks, and scalability constraints, and no single channel is sufficient on its own.

The contamination question is not incidental. The San Francisco curbside pilot, trialled way back in 2017 in partnership with recycling provider Recology, was ultimately discontinued when collection costs consistently exceeded the value of recovered materials—a failure driven in significant part by contamination that degraded bale quality and undermined end-market viability. Cerenzia is direct on the point: convenient collection alone cannot drive viability without strong downstream markets. Supply can be increased through better access, but there must also be demand and stable markets to absorb that supply, as well as infrastructure to enable the pathways to those markets.

Even modest diversion scenarios carry significant economic potential. The study's modelling indicates that redirecting 10% of currently landfilled textiles into reuse streams would divert over 118,000 tonnes annually and support  1,000 jobs in collection, sorting, and processing. At the 24% diversion rate achieved by France's ReFashion programme in its 12th year of operation—the study's more ambitious benchmark—that figure rises to 2,500 jobs and 284,000 tonnes diverted per year, with the underlying job-creation ratio running at 85 positions per 10,000 tonnes of recovered material.

The environmental returns are substantial. At a 10% diversion rate, the study estimates greenhouse gas savings of between 521,000 and 730,000 metric tonnes of CO2 equivalent annually—comparable to eliminating the total energy emissions of up to 98,000 homes in a single year. Should California reach the 24% benchmark, those savings could rise to between 1.2 and 1.7 million metric tonnes of CO2e—the equivalent of shutting down up to 4.6 gas-fired power plants for a year.

The cumulative trajectory makes the infrastructure investment case even more compelling. If California were to follow France's early growth pattern—achieving 13% year-on-year growth after a 10% diversion rate in its first year of operation—the study calculates that over 767,000 tonnes of textiles could be kept out of California's landfills over a five-year period.

Those end markets extend beyond California's borders, and the politics of that reality are unresolved. France's experience is revealing: even after 15 years of EPR operation, ReFashion reported in early 2025 that 90% of reusable clothing was exported, partly because domestic demand was insufficient.

Global reuse markets are operationally essential—sustaining collection flows, supporting livelihoods in importing economies, and keeping textiles circulating at a scale that purely domestic markets cannot absorb. The Guatemala case study cited in the report, in which a single retailer imported over 52,000 tonnes of used textiles from the US in 2024 with only 3.27% ultimately disposed of as waste, suggests that responsible global trade is operationally achievable. The precondition, as Wallander argues, is "transparent reporting on grades/destinations, enforceable labour standards, and verified partners"—accountability mechanisms that sit within the PRO's reporting obligations under SB 707.

Underpinning all of this is a regulatory friction that operates at the most local level of governance. Municipal zoning rules, permitting requirements, setback restrictions, and bin-size limits across cities including Los Angeles, Oakland, and San José currently constrain where collection infrastructure can be sited and how it can operate.

For USAgain, these constraints are not administrative irritants—they are structural barriers that determine whether a statewide EPR network can function at all. If local governments fail to align their ordinances with the recovery goals SB 707 has established, the policy's ambitions will encounter their most immediate and practical limit not in the market, but in the municipal code.

California Sets the Terms for Everyone

California's textile EPR law represents more than a regional environmental regulation. It is an attempt to impose circular-economy logic on an industry built around constant product turnover. Should it work, other governments will take note—and brands will face the same reckoning in other places too. Should it fall short, the gap between what the fashion industry produces and what any recovery system can handle will remain as wide as ever, only now with California's failure on the record.