Report Calls for Rewarding Sustainable Practices in UK Industry, Level-Playing Field Would Be Crucial

SUSTAINABILITY: Sustainability in the fashion and textile industry is moving in the right direction, but measurable progress is too slow and needs to accelerate. 

• There is a need for systemic change, including wider recognition of the opportunities for the UK apparel and textile sectors, with increased sustainable investment: reductions in the environmental impact at product-level are currently overshadowed by increases in unit consumption overall. This may partly be the result of a rebound effect, whereby consumption increases as products are made more efficiently and therefore more cheaply. 
• Furthermore, there persists the fundamental challenge of the misalignment of climate targets with linear economic growth models. 
• SMEs and larger firms sharing the costs of innovation will be key to developing new circular economies, where brands need to establish supply chain collaborations with business partners further downstream as well as upstream to manage the flow of their used products beyond the point of sale. 
• Further research is needed to determine the most economically viable, environmentally sustainable, socially equitable, and culturally acceptable ways of achieving this.
• Sustainability strategies vary across the sector, depending on the position within the supply chain, company ethos and the availability of resources. 
• Data availability and quality is currently variable, making it difficult to enable accurate assessment of environmental impacts, e.g. GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions, especially Scopes 2 and 31, associated with specific textile products. 
• There are cost barriers to achieving sustainability, especially for SMEs, including the cost of financing full life cycle assessments (LCAs) for company products, and costs associated with responding to EU regulatory changes, including the introduction of extended producer responsibility (EPR). 
• There is a lack of UK-specific incentives, e.g. an EPR scheme that financially incentivises transitional change consistent with environmental/climate targets. 

CIRCULARITY: Uncertainty around definitions of ‘circular’ or ‘sustainable’, is leading to unintended greenwashing and reticence by some businesses to disclose sustainable practices. 

• Realising full product-level circularity is challenging due to lengthy global supply chains, and a geographical mismatch between where post-consumer waste accrues, i.e. in the UK, and where the bulk of textile manufacturing currently takes place, i.e. Asia.
• Additional challenges include limited markets for the collected non-rewearable textile waste, as well as the lack of scaled-up recycling infrastructure capable of valorising mixed textile waste.
• There is a need to further articulate the nature of a circular economy for fashion and textiles, including fostering cultures of repair and long-term value of products. 

MATERIALS: There is a lack of consensus on what constitutes a “sustainable fibre” in relation to specific products, with current eco-metrics for fibres based on oversimplified assumptions, or cradle-to-gate LCAs, rather than the full life cycle of specific products. 

• Improved data and science-based eco-credentials are required to enable informed decision-making about feedstocks based on renewable, recycled, used, deadstock materials, biobased materials based on regenerative agriculture, or recyclable biopolymer feedstocks, including bioplastics. 
• The compatibility of materials with likely end-of-life waste management processes, including reuse and recycling, should be a criterion when initially choosing materials. 
• Systems-level consideration of a material’s place in the sustainable and circular economy is needed. This includes rational decision-making on an individual product basis about whether biobased materials should be recyclable—keeping resources in circulation—biodegradable, or both, to prevent the release of biogenic carbon (GHGs). 

LONGEVITY: A focus on producing well-made, high-quality products, as defined by quantitative, measurable technical specifications could potentially reduce resource use by extending the service life of products This product-level approach should work in tandem with business services such as repair, refurbishment, leasing, or resale, to facilitate longer service lives for fashion, apparel and textile products. 

• Social and cultural narratives promoting quality and longevity are needed to motivate consumers to keep and care for items for longer, enhancing both perceived, and monetary value of products. 

DIGITAL: Digital technologies, including AI and machine learning, are being used to align product design and production with consumer preferences; concepts such as right first-time design, and make-to-order personalisation offer potential to reduce inventory levels and waste. 

• Digitisation of production processes and the integration of robotics into textile manufacturing show potential to optimise efficiency and promote reshoring, through decoupling cost-efficient manufacturing from low labour cost locations. 
• Digital track and trace technologies, and evidence-based product level data, could improve supply chain transparency, as well as engage consumers. 
• Regulatory pressure including the introduction of Digital Product Passport (DPP) legislation in the EU is accelerating the demand for accurate product-level environmental impact data, with complete digital solutions still under development. People.
• A lack of accurate information in marketing and at the point of sale is a key barrier to supporting informed decision-making by consumers of fashion, textile and apparel products. The existing use of eco-metrics associated with the Higg Materials Sustainability Index (Higg, 2023) and the EU’s Product Environmental Footprint (European Commission, 2013), provide limited full-product life cycle impact information. 

CONSUMER AWARENESS: The need for increased consumer awareness and engagement was highlighted to further support the mandate for sustainable practices to become more widespread. This may be scaffolded by enabling consumers to more readily access details of the provenance and environmental impacts of their clothing, as well as appropriate product use-phase care, repair and end-of-life arrangements.  This requires an upskilled workforce able to deliver care and repair services.

• More research and new tools are required to improve consumer knowledge about how their own purchasing behaviour affects climate impacts, as well as upskilling consumers and the sector workforce in product care and repair skills. 

CERTIFICATION: Fair and equitable treatment of employees, partners and suppliers is a crucial part of building socially and culturally sustainable international supply chains. There is a proliferation of sustainability certification schemes for the fashion and textile industry, the majority of which involve fee payments. 

• While certification is helping to provide improved certainty on specific sustainability claims, it usually involves fees and significant resourcing, such that participation is prohibitively costly, particularly for start-ups and SMEs, affecting their competitiveness.
• More research is needed into supportive policy instruments that centralise and incentivise certification.
• Participation in schemes is considered desirable, but resourcing is expensive and unachievable for many start-ups and SMEs. 
• Large retailers making such certification a prerequisite for suppliers has a knock-on effect on the competitiveness of SMEs. 
• The research also raised concerns about the alignment of some certification schemes to Net Zero targets, as well as the resourcing demands, which can lead to opportunity costs. 

INVESTMENT: Many businesses find R&D application processes time-consuming, and require input from experts, necessitating further targeted resourcing of university infrastructures to support this activity. 

• R&D funding in some key areas is still lacking, e.g. citizen engagement, consumer psychology, education and skills, and systems-level approaches to sustainable materials. 

REGULATION: Businesses generally welcome policy, such as Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) if it provides a level playing field, and to create a business case for sustainable/circular practices and business models. 

• There is an important opportunity to financially incentivise pro-environmental consumer behaviour and decision-making aligned with Green Growth and Net Zero targets. 
• Developments such as the EU’s Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles (European-Commission, 2022), come at a cost to companies (particularly SMEs), making it more difficult to compete. 
• Lack of industry consultation also risks current policy taking a one-size fits-all approach that does not sufficiently account for individual business features such as size, sub-sector market activities and product range.

THE CONTEXT: There is a clear imperative for the fashion and textile industry to reduce environmental impacts, including along international supply chain operations. 

• Strategic approaches and points of focus in relation to sustainability differ markedly between companies, reflecting differences in the size and operational focus within their own supply chain. 

Companies are investing in a range of sustainability strategies, including but not limited to: 

1. adoption of eco-certification;
2. measurement of carbon footprints;
3. switching to preferred/alternative fibre materials;
4. reducing waste;
5. harnessing digitaltechnologies across the value chain; and
6. reverse logistics, new collection infrastructure or post-purchase repair services, normally with the aim increasing product longevity. 

Fair and equitable treatment of people in supply chains is also viewed together with environmentally conscious practices. However, this progress is associated with additional costs, making it more difficult to compete with others in the international marketplace, at least in the short term until regulatory change is fully operational in some regions, e.g. the EU. 

• Policies currently being implemented in the EU, such as Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) and Digital Product Passports (DDP), were viewed as positive and something that most interviewed businesses would also welcome in the UK. It was noted that such EU policies will affect UK business exporting to other countries in Europe while also providing consumer-facing opportunities to increase brand transparency. 

THE REPORT is based on joint research by the Business of Fashion, Textiles and Technology (BFTT), University of the Arts London, and the Future Fashion Factory (FFF), University of Leeds. BFTT and FFF are part of the Creative Industries Clusters Programme (CICP), an £80m initiative associated with the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund (ISCF), delivered by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) on behalf of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).

• Authors: Dr Anja Connor-Crabb, Dr Sophie Bulman, Dr Claire Bunyan, Dr Yue Guo, Amy Hulme, Sue Rainton, Laura Solomon, Professor Steven Toms. Editor: Lucy Graham Graphic Design: Philipp Doringer. Contributors:  Dr Alessandra Vecchi and Dr Francesca Bonetti.

ABOUT: The Business of Fashion, Textiles and Technology (BFTT), a £6m creative research and development (R&D) partnership led by the University of the Arts London (UAL). BFTT operates at the intersection of design, STEM, cultural anthropology and business practices, to support circular and sustainable collaborative research and development, led by industry. 

• A multi-disciplinary partnership, BFTT has led R&D in collaboration with Loughborough University, University College London, University of Leeds, Queen Mary University of London, University of Cambridge, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. 
• Key industry partners include leading fashion and textile brands, online retailers, emergent design companies, sectoral business trade associations, including the UK Fashion & Textile Association, the British Fashion Council, and regional partnership from GLA, LEPs and SHIFT. BFTT is part of UAL’s Fashion, Textiles and Technology Institute (FTTI), convening interdisciplinary expertise to deliver sustainable research and innovation, and curriculum development across the global apparel and textile value chain, and adjacent sectors.