Study Calls for Multi-Level Coordination Between Exporting and Importing Countries, Involving Affected Communities

MAKING IT WORK: The study makes a slew of recommendations, but primarily from a Chile-EU perspective. However, these can be adapted by other countries and geo-political entities.

Make changes to international trade agreements:

• Develop minimum international criteria for second-hand clothing exports to ensure that importing countries only receive garments that have a market value, or that can be recycled.
• Agree between both parties on legal definitions of ‘textile waste’ and ‘second-hand clothing’ and establish quality restrictions on their import from exporting countries. 
• Set internationally agreed standards to clearly distinguish between second-hand clothing and textile waste and establish mechanisms to track their trade flows by building on existing UN work in partnership with international and regional players.

Pursue domestic policy action in importing countries: 

• Adopt administrative measures at the port of Iquique to ensure digital traceability of flows of second-hand clothing and textile waste, based on international standards (i.e. the UNECE-UN/CEFACT traceability standard).
• Digitise all shipment, transport, and control procedures to help avoid smuggling and transporting waste to illegal dumps.
• Introduce automated customs declarations, electronic cargo tracking, risk-based inspections, and digital inventory controls to improve traceability. In addition, provisions for infrastructure improvements should be in place to ensure that goods destined for bonded warehouses can be transported from the port of entry safely and efficiently
• Use customs cooperation and mutual support agreements with trading partners to increase information exchange. These agreements can serve as effective mechanisms for customs officials to track exports before they are shipped or when they are sent to a third country and then re-exported to that country.
• Establish a Circular Economy Strategy for Textiles covering the entire process from import, through incorporation into new production processes, to delivery of recycled products and repair services. Textile waste, whether it comes from second-hand clothing entering the country or from new clothing purchased by nationals, requires a strategy to prevent it from becoming waste and to keep it as a productive factor in the economy.
• Set up public-private alliances to undertake recycling projects and other circular economy activities through tax-extension schemes and funds to support entrepreneur- ship, innovation, and job creation for vulnerable groups.
• Improve the legal framework for waste management, including textile recycling, by speeding up the preparation, approval, and enforcement of laws on Extended Producer Responsibility and recycling.
• Implement a regional solid waste control plan involving inspections of sanitary landfills, clean points, and dumps to increase the enforcement capacity of regional health authorities. Enhancing the control capacity of the regional health authority concerning illegal textile dumping by implementing a Prioritized Regional Plan for solid waste control into annual territorial planning would involve conducting inspections of sanitary landfills, clean points and landfills to ensure compliance with regulations. 
• Evaluate the environmental impacts of textile dumps. 

Pursue domestic policy action in exporting countries:

• Make circular economy considerations central to the design of clothing, with mandatory targets to improve the quality, durability, repairability, and recyclability of garments. This includes design for disassembly and end-to-end traceability of garments and fibres, including their origin. 
• Introduce an Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) system that holds companies that put products on the market responsible for those products after use, incentivising improvements in quality, and increases in rates of repair, reuse, and recycling. 
• Develop more sorting and recycling plants by providing financial incentives to scale up affordable technologies and solutions that support recycling, particularly blended fibres. Policymakers should explore fiscal and non-fiscal incentives for innovation, and the introduction of mandatory recycling targets for manufacturers would stimulate the demand from manufacturers for recycled fibres.
• Incentivise and facilitate increased levels of traceability and transparency in fashion value chains through the expanded use of DPPs, improved labelling, and more significant data collection on the flow of items domestically and internationally.
• Run awareness-raising campaigns to encourage consumers to make more informed choices about their clothes, such as buying fewer items of better quality, renting rather than buying some garment types, and circulating clothes to peers after use.
• Take measures to tackle fast fashion and ultra-fast fashion by, for instance, levying a fee per garment to take account of its environmental impacts, charging consumers for returning clothes after a short period (to reduce the number of second-hand clothes going to waste), restricting advertising of certain products, and mandating retailers to include an item’s reuse, repair, recycling potential and environmental impact alongside its price.