They’ve gone after single-use plastics, they’ve made a lunge at agricultural fertilizer — and now, the Liberals might be going after clothes.
In July, Environment and Climate Change Canada announced its intent to address “plastic waste and pollution from the textile and apparel sector.” In short, there’s a plan in the works to reduce clothing waste. It’s far too early to know what it will entail, but the consultation documents raise a key concern: will clothes become more expensive?
Textile waste is, indeed, a problem that afflicts the whole world. The manufacturing process for pulp-based synthetic fibres, like viscose, creates chemical waste. Their petroleum-based counterparts, like polyester and nylon, can’t biologically degrade, which means the discarded clothes they compose can’t properly break down and complete the carbon cycle. Your shirts shed microplastics in the dryer, and that’s a bad thing.
Whether it’s a significant bad thing worthy of federal intervention, however, is another matter.
Environment Canada’s own documents don’t present much of a pressing case: one federally commissioned study estimated textiles to account for 4.3 per cent of all residential waste. Then there’s industrial waste: upholstery, carpets, kitchen and home textiles and, of course, more clothing. The feds are primarily concerned with petroleum-based textiles, given their indestructibility — and these only account for six per cent of all plastic waste in Canada.
The environmental case for more textile regulations, thus, depends a good deal on global statistics, which factor in pollution from places that actually mass-manufacture clothes, like China and India, as well as high-population countries that have general garbage problems due to a lack of state infrastructure.
So, your discarded poly-blends aren’t actually all that big of a problem here: your country doesn’t have the jurisdiction to regulate the factories that made them; your rivers and oceans aren’t clogged with trash because we use sophisticated systems to keep clean; your house contains microplastics, but they’re not an immediate risk to human health.
Whatever solutions Ottawa comes up with, they’re unlikely to change any of this. The role envisioned is, consequently, vague:
“Collaboration between all levels of government is required to prevent and reduce waste, and control plastic pollution, from the textile and apparel sector,” reads the consultation document. “The federal government proposes to develop this roadmap and play a coordination role in its implementation” which could include “development and implementation of potential federal measures.”
Some ideas for what any of this could actually mean in practice are set out in the document. The feds could support more research into textile waste, it suggests. Incentives to donate clothing to increase reuse could be made. Repair shops could be granted support to extend clothing life. New standards for clothing recyclability and durability could be created. Take-back programs to repurpose clothes could be initiated, as could the development of textile recycling technology.
On microplastics, awareness campaigns, shedding performance standards and labelling programs and additional washing machine filtration standards were raised as possibilities.
These would all be great ideas … for individuals and the private sector to consider. Not for the Canadian government to dictate.
Personally, I like having high-quality, long-lasting clothing. I’d prefer not to waste time and money shopping for garments that fall apart after three washes. I would rather repair than throw out, and, if I could, I’d rid my home of microfibres. I’m pro-waste reduction, within reason, within the boundaries of my home. But, importantly, these are all choices that I am free to make — nobody is forcing my hand, nor should they.
As for other people’s choices, some will go further, and others won’t. Many people need low-cost clothing. Some of it lasts, some of it doesn’t, but it’s hardly the federal government’s business. Really, it’s a source of relief that shouldn’t be tampered with: unlike food and gas, it hasn’t become more expensive over time: the consumer price index for clothing has actually gone down since 2003.
It shouldn’t be up to the public to subsidize private tailoring businesses, clothing recyclers and sewing classes, either.
It’s hard to trust that a federal government can stick its nose into the apparel and textile industry without making things more expensive for the Canadian consumer. Marginal improvements might be made to quality through federal regulation, but these are sure to cost. Canada is a tiny market; as influential as we’d like ourselves to be, big change will happen at the whims of the European Union and the United States.
For once, the Liberals should just let things be.
National Post