UNEP

Efforts to regulate global textile waste are reshaping debates over who defines sustainability and who bears its costs. A UNEP initiative to standardise “waste” classifications has triggered backlash from reuse economies, exposing how circularity policies can threaten livelihoods and distort trade while ignoring the real drivers of overproduction in wealthier manufacturing nations.

As policymakers seek to standardise global rules on textile waste, African traders find themselves contending with definitions that could reshape their markets. Atobrah Edward Brinkley, Secretary of the Ghana Used Clothing Dealers Association, argues that lived realities of reuse and repair deserve equal recognition within sustainability frameworks largely framed by institutions far removed from their economies.

As international agencies develop new criteria for textile “waste,” concerns are emerging over how these definitions affect circular trade and livelihoods. SMART, the US-based association for secondary materials and recycled textiles, urges clarity and inclusiveness. Its Director of Government Affairs, Jessica Franken, stresses that credible environmental frameworks require full transparency and peer-reviewed data.

Efforts to tighten global definitions of “waste” have sparked a struggle over the future of reuse economies. Teresiah Wairimu Njenga, who leads the Mitumba Consortium Association of Kenya, argues that poorly conceived guidelines risk collapsing viable circular systems under the guise of environmental reform, while the real issue of fast-fashion overproduction remains unaddressed.

As the global textiles industry faces mounting scrutiny over waste, UNEP’s efforts to define what counts as “used” or “discarded” are sparking tension. Critics warn that new circularity rules risk undermining reuse economies in developing countries, threatening livelihoods and exposing how environmental ambition can collide with economic dependence.

A UNEP-led integrated programme (IP) has been launched to promote sustainable supply chains in the fashion industry in a bid to address the impact of the sector on biodiversity loss, chemicals and waste, climate change, international waters, and land degradation.

It is not just an irony, but an outright travesty that this needs to be emphasised: the second-hand clothing sector does indeed generate jobs in a region where millions live below the International Poverty Line of $2.15 a day. A study that looked at SHC in Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Malawi, Mozambique and Zambia explored a facet that anti-waste activists unfortunately choose to ignore.

The Nairobi session of the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA-6) has called on governments to facilitate a Global Textiles Policy Dialogue to urgently scale up policy efforts that minimise negative impacts of the textiles value chain on nature, people and economies.

The Sixth UN Environment Assembly in February will focus on the need for a policy dialogue and coordination mechanism to give cohesion and support the upscaling of current policy efforts to minimise negative impacts on nature, people and economies of the textile value chain.

A Global Plastics Treaty that seeks to protect human health and the environment from the adverse effects of plastic pollution, based on a comprehensive approach that addresses the full life cycle of plastic through the prevention, progressive reduction and remediation of plastic pollution, management and utilisation of plastic and plastic waste according to national priorities by 2040, is closer to reality.