Scathing UK parliament report calls for ‘anti-waste’ tax on apparel firms
19/02/2019
Parliament’s environmental audit committee issued a statement on February 19 to say clothing companies must take responsibility for the waste they create. It said the government should impose a one penny responsibility charge on every item of clothing and that manufacturers should pay the charge.
Committee chair, Mary Creagh, said on releasing the statement: “Fashion shouldn’t cost the earth. Our insatiable appetite for clothes comes with a huge social and environmental price tag. Carbon emissions, water use, chemical and plastic pollution are all destroying our environment.”
She claimed that consumers in the UK buy more clothes per person than their counterparts in every other country in Europe but that the readiness with which people have embraced fast fashion means most “overconsume and under use” the garments they buy.
“As a result, we have over a million tonnes of clothes, with a value of £140 million, going to landfill every year,” Ms Creagh added.
She went further and said that children should learn in school “the joy of making and mending clothes” and she suggested this could be “an antidote to anxiety and the mental health crisis in teenagers” at the same time as helping to reduce waste.
She was critical of fashion brands and retailers, saying they had “chased the cheap needle around the planet”, outsourcing production to countries “with low pay and little trade union representation”. She said: “Behind the perfect Instagram profiles and the pristine shop fronts of our fashion retailers the reality is shocking, [with] illegally low pay, the use of child labour, prison labour, forced labour and bonded labour in the global garment supply chain.
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