Honestly, it’s time for us to hark back to our fashion/ lifestyle of yore. A time when clothes, or for that matter, any other item, be it bedlinen, upholstery or sundry household linen survived for generations. At my mother’s place some sets of soft cotton bedsheets from a ‘trusted’ brand were used when we were kids, her grandchildren hopped along the way, and today, when she is bedridden, they are still being used, after perhaps a thousand hand and machine washes. The print, specially of the rosebud and leaves two, was hopelessly grabbed and tried-to-be-plucked by all hands-and-knees crawlers to no avail, and even though it has begun to fade, the print still evokes smiles and memories, once in many whiles, as we sit yapping around her.
Who were those manufacturers? Cotton bedlinen from that same brand now doesn’t last more than 5-6 washes, though must admit the fabric stays on for much longer. Well, after all these decades of use-and-throw that has filled the earth with trash discarded by us humans, impacting climate and livelihood, some proposed new rules by the European Union on waste will support the separate collection of textile waste; and this will become mandatory in the EU by 2025.
They will create: Mandatory and harmonised Extended Producer Responsibility for textiles across all Member States with eco-modulation of fees; rules to manage textile waste in line with the waste hierarchy: used clothes to be directed as a priority to re-use; more textile waste to be recycled; incentives for producers to increase the circularity of products by design, innovate and boost circular economy business models; local jobs and larger markets for used textiles and secondary raw materials; cost-saving opportunities for citizens moving from fast fashion to timeless fashion.
If European consumption of textiles is one of the top three pressures on water and land use, and the top five in terms of raw material use and greenhouse gas emissions in the EU, imagine the numbers for India with its humungous and ever-growing population.
This vision, set for 2030, will have a global impact. Can we embark on that journey at the individual and organisational level, now?
