Does the US Need an Eco-Impact Label for Clothing?
It was a blink-and-almost-miss-it moment. Over the summer, two members of Congress introduced a bill that would require the Environmental Protection Agency to work with apparel manufacturers to develop a voluntary clothing label detailing the carbon footprint of a blouse, a jacket or a pair of jeans.
The aim of the bipartisan measure, initiated by Illinois Democrat Sean Casten and backed by Florida Republican María Elvira Salazar, sounded simple enough: provide a way for American consumers to weigh the environmental pros and cons of a potential purchase before they head to—or click on—checkout. But it also appeared untouched by the broader discourse that has been raging in Europe over the intricacies and nuances of grading how “green” something is, which could present complications. An even more salient question in today’s divided states of America: Could such a label even get the go-ahead in Washington, D.C., where the political gridlock is worse than its traffic?
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Casten thinks he can get both sides of the aisle on board with the so-called Voluntary Sustainable Apparel Labeling Act, or H.R. 8978, but only if the label isn’t compulsory. While he’s noticed a growing desire from consumers to understand the climate impacts of their shopping decisions, what’s missing is a neutral authority that can crunch the data on where someone is “better off buying cotton or polyester or bamboo fiber or silk” without “cherry-picking facts.” It’ll be like the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, he added, referring to the thumbs up that the magazine gives to products that pass its battery of tests with flying colors. In other words, companies are not obligated to use it.
Casten said there was a “rich conversation” to be had about what and how measurements happen, but that he would punt it to the EPA. He didn’t think it would be hard work for the agency because “most of the work already has been done.” The EPA declined a request for an interview.
“I think there are some legitimately complicated issues to get into that I think we can probably defer to the agency,” he said. “How often have you bought a piece of clothing that rather than a plastic label has this cutesy cardboard label that says, ‘We’re a B Corp’ and makes you feel good? But is that just marketing? Or is that legit?”
Greenwashing, which involves false or misleading marketing claims that trump up a product’s social and environmental virtues, is an issue that has attracted mounting scrutiny from legislators worldwide. Italy’s competition watchdog is investigating Giorgio Armani and Christian Dior for potentially overstating their artisanal allure after Milanese authorities found evidence of worker abuse and exploitation in their supply chains. The Canadian Competition Bureau has opened an inquiry into Lululemon following a complaint that the yogawear-maker was misleading consumers about its impact on the planet. And Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority, which earlier this year elicited agreements from Asos, Boohoo and George at Asda to use only “accurate and clear” sustainability claims, recently warned 17 “well-known” fashion brands about touting green claims that are unaccompanied by substantive evidence.
One of the highest-profile cases so far, however, has to do with the then-Sustainable Apparel Coalition’s Higg Materials Sustainability Index, which underwent an urgent strategic review in 2022 after the Norwegian Consumer Authority declared that Norr?na was “breaking the law” when it hawked its outdoor wear as better for the planet using MSI data that was based on global averages. The multi-stakeholder group’s consumer-facing Transparency Program, which it designed to parse the impact of clothing and footwear items across such metrics as water, greenhouse-gas emissions and fossil fuels, was put on ice.
The overall verdict was that bad or insufficient data leads to erroneous conclusions, something that perhaps no one was more pleased about than natural fiber producers and their advocates, who have long charged the MSI of rating synthetic materials as environmentally more virtuous, potentially stoking their use by manufacturers keen to cut emissions without taking a more holistic view of the product life cycle.
“I’ve not been following that super closely,” said Casten of the Higg imbroglio, though he added that his first job out of graduate school involved conducting full fuel cycle analyses of different products to gauge the impacts of their emissions, making him more familiar than most with what he described as the “politics” of favoring one data set over another to benefit a certain group.
“I don’t think you can avoid those political tensions. But I think you do need someone who’s objectively entrusted with the public interest in data integrity to say, ‘O.K., this is how we’re going to roll,’” he said. “I mean, carbon accounting isn’t fundamentally financial accounting. Some of the rules are kind of random. But as long as everybody’s bound by the same set of rules, there’s no confusion about what it is that you’re measuring.”
Determining a framework
Deciding what kind of data to mine is a morass of its own, too. The same arguments over the MSI have coalesced around the Product Environmental Footprint, part of the European Union’s proposed green claims directive. They largely involve what the category rules should measure: repairability, say, or microfiber generation. That the PEF technical secretariat for apparel and footwear was convened by the SAC, now renamed Cascale, just means that the same battle is taking place on a different field.
Baptiste Carriere-Pradal, who chairs the technical secretariat, said that the group has been taking in the feedback—much of which it broadly agrees with—but that it cannot overly tinker with the PEF’s current form without being forced to return it to the public consultation stage, as rules dictate.
“We just say this will be the next update of the PEF that will have to tackle that,” he said. “Now we are limited. We cannot go further.”
The European Commission is also working on a new data framework that will take years to complete but presents the opportunity to have more granular data that could help resolve the natural versus synthetic fight because “ultimately, many brands sell both synthetic and natural.”
Carriere-Pradal said he’s interested to see how an American version of the PEF—or, if the EPA goes down the emissions-only route, something more akin to the French mandate to disclose the carbon footprint of the garment, though its scoring is also based on the PEF—would take into account existing work on the issue. The PEF was criticized in the beginning for being incomplete. Now, it boasts 16 indicators, or more than triple the MSI’s five. Many of the larger brands—H&M Group, Nike, The North Face owner VF Corp. and Zara parent Inditex are voting members in the secretariat—have also weighed in on the PEF.
“If a T-shirt is sold in New York or in Paris, it’s still a T-shirt,” he said. “One of the big challenges the industry is facing is multiple reporting using different standards. We already have cases where they sometimes contradict each other. There is the risk of fragmentation internationally.”
Casten, for his part, sees a standard reporting system as the solution to reporting fatigue. But he also admitted that because H.R. 8978 is a voluntary bill, it “isn’t going to standardize.” On the other hand, “if you’ve got the imprimatur of the EPA on a standard, one would presume that that’s going to become the thing that people would congeal around, at least in the United States,” Casten added.
Still, it’s the voluntary nature of the bill that’s the problem, said Maxine Bédat, founder of the think-and-do tank The New Standard Institute and an architect of New York State’s Fashion Sustainability and Social Accountability Act, colloquially known as the New York Fashion Act.
“My broader critique about what is happening here is it’s an example of this industry somehow being seen as different from any other industrial industry, which is that there’s this baseline assumption that the consumer is going to drive the change,” she said. “You just don’t have that expectation in oil and gas. That’s not how the auto industry is regulated. Why is it different just because it’s clothing and marketed largely to women?”
Getting product-specific information that doesn’t rely on spotty secondary sources would be another heavy lift. There’s nothing wrong with having a consumer-facing label, Bédat said. The question is whether the information it presents is accurate or if it gives a “false sense” that even the brands themselves know that the product score is meaningful.
“There’s so much regulation out there that’s just collecting a bunch of data, and you just see all these ESG folks in these companies being overwhelmed by data collection that isn’t driving down the impact of the industry,” she said. “This industry is desperately in need of impact reduction, and we need to create the rules that are actually going to create the impact reduction. Why are we making the consumer the one who’s going to regulate this industry?”
Hilary Jochmans, president of Jochmans Consulting and founder of the advocacy community PoliticallyinFashion, has been helping facilitate conversations with Casten’s office. She said that H.R. 8978 is significant because it has both Democrat and Republican support, something that’s rarely seen in this retail policy space beyond the desire to crack down on Shein and Temu. Even the newly minted Slow Fashion Caucus in Congress only has Democratic members.
Regulation around fashion has been slow but it’s also increasing, as California’s recently greenlit extended producer responsibility scheme for textiles proves. It’s important, she said, to view legislation as “a marathon, not a sprint.”
“When I first started PoliticallyinFashion in 2020, I was talking about a lot of these issues, but it was more theoretical and abstract,” Jochmans said. “Now, we have actual bills to talk about, and actual legislation for folks to engage on and think about. And I think that’s huge, and I hope we keep up this momentum.”
Jochmans envisions a standardized set of disclosures that consumers can use much like nutrition labels on food. Which is to say, whatever regulators come up with must be immediately comprehensible for the average shopper.
“We get so bogged down in the details that sometimes we lose sight of the forest for the trees here,” she said. “I don’t know enough to say this rating system is better than this one or that one—people smarter than I can make those decisions. But I do hope everyone comes to the table in good faith to work something out. We’ve got to start somewhere.”
John Mark Kolb, a staffer at Salazar’s office said the people behind the bill are still in the learning phase and that they welcome feedback. And while funding to fill in the myriad data gaps that have bedeviled efforts to measure fashion’s impact is not on the docket, this could be a conversation down the road. For now, they’re taking things one step at a time, including potentially pushing for a Senate version of the bill.
“We expect this to be an iterative process; this is going to have to be developed by experts,” he said. “It’s not one of those circumstances where we sat, ‘Hey, here’s the product. Everyone accept it.’ We actually want feedback. We’re acknowledging that if we can make it better, we’d love to hear that.”
Have the offices engaged with stakeholders, including trade groups such as the American Apparel & Footwear Association?
“Those conversations are still happening,” Kolb said. “But that would be someone that’s on our list. That goal is to speak to everyone.”
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