Textile sustainability through product regulation ignores half of our brain

As readers of my past articles know, I do not consider regulation to be the silver bullet to sustainable textile production and consumption. My position is somewhat nuanced. On the one hand, I believe that without regulation, this industry's negative environmental and social impacts will grow unchecked in lock-step with its global production growth. On the other side, I'm afraid that all regulation will accomplish is turn the sector into a corporate compliance machine with many unintended economic and societal consequences, including throttling innovation, creativity, and diversity (and maybe only a limited impact on the negative externalities we try to combat). 

In today’s essay I want to explore why a purely technocratic approach to textile sustainability built on product regulation, reporting, certification and traceability may be fundamentally at odds with human thinking and behaviour patterns that express themselves in highly complex and intricate ways through fashion production and consumption.

Fashion and the two brain hemispheres

The underlying idea of my exploration is the concept of the two brain halves (or hemispheres) as most deeply studied and thoroughly described in Iain McGilchrist’s seminal works such as “The Master and His Emissary” or “The Matter with Things”. According to McGilchrist the left hemisphere is the place of logical, sequential, analytical, detailed and mechanistic thinking, while in the right hemisphere holistic, creative, intuitive, relational, and context-aware processes dominate. It is in the right hemisphere were external stimuli are absorbed and holistically comprehended (understood), while the left hemisphere apprehends (grabs) individual elements of our perception and analyses, manipulates, categorises and assesses them against our existing world view.

Applied to a fashion design or fashion purchase decision making process; the left brain hemisphere would assess if the product has the necessary functionality for the intended use, whether it has the right size, dimension, fit, colour, material composition and an acceptable product cost or purchase price. The right hemisphere would consider its beauty, the overall look and feel, whether it projects the intended message of status, belonging, mindset or mood of the moment of the wearer. Fashion design is considered a quintessential creative profession and fashion shopping a highly emotional activity, both attributes are firmly linked to the right brain hemisphere.

What is technical product regulation

To regulate a product means to describe its structure, composition and function in great detail, to make certain attributes measurable and comparable and to define criteria, parameters, benchmarks or standards against which the characteristics of a concrete product can be assessed. Producers or sellers need to demonstrate that they have processes in place that enable them to ensure compliance of the products they put on the market. Databases, test methods, reports, certificates or labels are all tools to demonstrate compliance. Non-compliance or lack of proof of compliance can both engender serious legal and financial risks.

The earliest forms of (technical) product regulation focussed on health and safety of people producing, using or otherwise entering in contact with the product in question. Later-on also environmental protection, often as an indirect human health and safety concern such as water pollution, became subject of regulation. But over time regulation has pervaded almost all sectors of the economy and spheres of society. Some sectors of the economy such as healthcare or air transport have become so heavily regulated, that literally no unregulated product or process is allowed to exist in it. The products of the textile and fashion sector on the other hand, with few exceptions such as personal protective equipment (PPE), have remained largely unregulated, while the industrial processes of making textiles and clothing are subject to varying environmental and social regulation, depending on the country of operation.

Technically regulated textiles

With the EU textile strategy, the European Union has set out to change this and make also everyday textile and clothing products subject to (potentially complex) technical regulation with the objective of significantly lowering their negative environmental (and social) impacts such as CO2 emission, land and water use and pollution, waste generation, chemical health hazards or labour exploitation. The centrepiece of the envisaged regulatory edifice is the Ecodesign for Sustainable Product Regulation (ESPR) which attempts initially for clothing, later likely also for interior textiles and footwear, to define both product performance and information requirements to (1) ensure that only products with demonstrably lower impact are placed on the EU market and (2) to enable consumers to make better informed sustainable purchase decisions.

ESPR is a proven EU regulatory tool, but has so far only been used for energy-consuming products such as electrical devices. The extension to non-energy-consuming products such as textiles is a non-trivial exercise. To rank/categorise products according to their energy consumption has 3 beneficial features: (1) it is an easy to measure single parameter and lowering it is (2) beneficial for the consumer in the form of lower operating costs and (3) good for the environment/society due to lower CO2 emissions.

Textile products unfortunately do not have such single technical product parameter that is both easy to measure and clearly beneficial to consumer and environment. Instead, regulators are currently looking at two laundry lists (no pun intended) of potential technical characteristics such as durability, repairability, recyclability, recycled content, chemical substances of concern (SoC) and product environmental footprint (PEF – a laundry list in itself) on the one side, and impact categories such as CO2 emissions, land & water use, waste, pollution, health hazards...on the other. Each of those more or less measurable technical characteristic can influence different impact categories in several ways and several technical characteristics can negatively impact each other. An analytical riddle for even the most powerful left brain hemispheres out there.

Interestingly, there is one single silver bullet parameter that could reduce all negative impact categories at once. This miracle parameter is maximum number of wears/uses. Unfortunately this is not a direct technical product parameter and no product designer nor fashion consumer, let alone regulator, knows how to rationally optimise it.

The soft side of fashion

The reason fashion designers are unable to do it is simply due to the fact that basically 100% of the products they develop are destined for people whose needs, desires and fashion consumption habits they don’t know. They try to guess, often more than a year in advance, the dressing desire of an imaginary consumer who is part of a vaguely defined socio-demographic cohort (target group). And even an on-demand or ultra-fast consumer to designer to producer feedback system can only improve the sell-through ratio (leaving fewer products unsold), but not effectively influence the number of wears each sold item achieves.

This is because consumers themselves are only marginally better at this job, proven by the amount of little used or entirely unworn garments found in textile waste collection bins. Purchase decisions are far from rational, but heavily influenced by factors that are entirely uncorrelated with the maximisation of wears of the purchased item. A non-exhaustive list of such factors include dopamine, FOMO, rush, stress, social pressure, weather patterns, wishful thinking, inability to predict reaction of peers, online shopping, buying for others and many more.

And even if a future superintelligent AI shopping assistant with perfect access to a consumer’s wardrobe information, past product wear data and outstanding behaviour forecasting ability could produce reliable ex-ante numbers of wear, fashion cannot and should not be reduced to a purely utilitarian enterprise.

There is just too much art, creativity, culture, tradition, craftsmanship, diversity and community linked to this sector of the economy that cannot be made subject to purely quantitative measures or regulatory standards. The emotional or cultural significance of textile materials and garments cannot be expressed or compressed into a digital product passport. The left-hemisphere-dominated framework of fashion sustainability through technical product regulation is incomplete and incompatible with the full nature of fashion.

What now?

Regulators should therefore give the current approach a hard look. They should single out one initial impact category as top priority to tackle. They should then weight potential measures to reduce the negative impact in terms of both their effectiveness and simplicity/speed of implementation, and finally monitor results and adjust as needed. If ESPR proves unsuitable for this, a higher EPR fee on all products (or very simply ecomodulated), perhaps with some support for low income consumers, could be the more impactful way to achieve progress.

But in its currently envisaged form, textile sustainability regulation, especially ESPR, is not only totally disregarding the important right brain drive of fashion design and consumption, but also risks entirely breaking the left brain halves of product developers, sourcing and supply chain experts, sustainability managers and market surveillance authorities.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed are my own and do not represent those of the European Technology Platform for the Future of Textiles and Clothing or any other organisation I may be affiliated with.