Patching Up After Fast Fashion

New laws and local fibers counter global machinery of extraction, dependence, and waste.

Of basic human needs— water, food, clothing, and shelter— I think clothing is the most exploitable for extractive profit. It’s endlessly variable, shippable, and shelf-stable. It frames who we are socially, and there’s no limit to how much we can consume. It’s also a medium for human creativity, full of beauty, authenticity, history, and complexity. But commercial interests have found good strategies to turn it into an ever-expanding, globally extractive money machine: Make your products perpetually obsolete. Promote low self-esteem generally, but associate temporary self-esteem with your newest products. Replace regional variation and expression with a globe-spanning, media-driven machinery of fashion and color trends that are dictated top-down. Equate price with status, and offer tiered prices. Dismiss DIY as embarrassing, and celebritize designers whose creations, like museum pieces, must not be altered. And, as they say in Brave New World, ending is better than mending.

This system reached its apotheosis in fast fashion, which is now notorious for exploitation, extraction, misrepresentation, and waste. We humans, being human, don’t all buy into it. This week’s first Fibersheds article describes an alternative to petroleum-based, extractive textile production: cotton grown regeneratively at an experimental research farm in Italy. It’s admittedly more expensive than synthetic or synthetic-fertilizer-based fibers, but not if you include external costs. The other two articles cover new flax farms in England and in California that are developing or acquiring what they need to mill, spin, and weave the flax they grow into commercial linen cloth.

Local textile production is one way of reducing the fashion industry’s harms. The state of California is taking another approach on a larger scale, with its new Responsible Textile Recovery Act (SB 707). The legislation makes textile and clothing producers responsible for the collection, repair, reuse, and recycling of their products. Other states and countries are considering similar legislation and watching California’s progress.

To learn more about SB 707, I talked with Joanne Brasch of the California Product Stewardship Council (CPSC), the nonprofit that sponsored the legislation. Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) laws like SB 707 started in the 1970s with the creation of the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission, which declares and makes manufacturers pay for product recalls. More recently, Brasch explained, EPR laws in California and elsewhere have been driven not only by consumers, but also by companies that have been taking responsibility at their own expense, and want their competition to do the same. For example, if you’ve been seeing more drug and medical sharps drop-off boxes, which help prevent water contamination and needle-stick injuries, it’s because of EPR legislation that was supported by companies like Eli Lilly, which had already been running their own pharmaceutical takeback program.

According to the last best estimate from 2018, California discards 1.2 million pounds of textiles per year. Much of this now winds up in Central America or South Asia. SB 707 requires California producers to set up repair programs, collection boxes, sorting facilities, and other infrastructure to repair or recycle this fabric, where “repair” means keeping the fabric structure intact, whether by mending or making something else (upcycling), and recycling distintegrates the cloth back into fibers. The statute emphasizes repair over recycling, because repair is less resource-intensive, and Brasch points out that the new laws don’t ban sending textiles to landfills— they just mean reducing it, and finding out how much is there and where it’s going. Things like athletic shoes, ski gear, and single-use medical textiles can be tough to handle, but the CPSC’s Textile Handlers Map, originally funded by the city of Napa, includes listings for shoe repair, reuse, and recycling shops.

Practically, producers comply with the statute by joining and supporting a producer responsibility organization (PRO) that coordinates operations. It’s a big job, but funded continuously by the member companies. Earlier this year, CalRecycle, the state’s recycling authority, reviewed applications to become its official textiles PRO from three newly-created nonprofits: a US-based spinoff of the global recycling and waste management conglomerate Landbell Group, an alliance of California clothing retailers advised by textile recovery orgs like the Salvation Army and Goodwill, and an alliance of California apparel producers. CalRecycle chose Landbell, which had a balance of stakeholders— e.g. you don’t want ski gear manufacturers to always outvote uniform retailers. Landbell’s application was the only one that discussed sending textile waste overseas. There’s now a lawsuit over the choice, from an industry association behind one of the applications that wasn’t selected.

California has numerous other EPR programs, including a new one for packaging (which other states are similarly addressing), but Brasch observes that none of them match the textile program in terms of community. To inform the legislation, the CPSC ran textile recovery pilots in several California cities, with Los Angeles being the largest and most ambitious, and as the bill progressed through the legislative process, fashion companies like Reformation, Everlane, Marmot, H&M, and others participated in the pilot. After the bill passed, membership numbers for the LA Pilot Working Group exploded, with many fashion designers inspired by new possibilities to work on textile reuse with producers.

Because of this interest, the CPSC set up the Redesign Connection listserv to matchmake clothing producers with vetted designers who are interested in repair. For example, when Reformation recently had a batch of unsellable denim jeans accidentally manufactured with faulty metal studs, a Redesign Connection designer drew up spec’s for how to upcycle them into gift bags that will be given out next month at the CPSC’s Recovered Textile event at the LA Cleantech Incubator. She also worked with a local factory to develop a new type of manufacturing line for them that could handle upcycling at scale.

Many fashionistas have already embraced long-lasting clothing with visible mending, both DIY and in brands like Magnolia Pearl, as a conscious rejection of fast fashion. California’s SB 707, amplified by the state’s cultural influence, promises to accelerate this trend and spread recognition of patches and repair stitching as consciously chosen statements of individuality, honesty, creativity, effort, resilience, and care for the world. Just like they meant back in the 1960’s-70’s hippie days— but presumably the cool kids will find a vocabulary that’s visually distinct from the old-fogey patchwork of their grandparents.

As a teen, I patched and customized my clothes, and my teenage kids do it now. I’m not sure why I stopped. Maybe I saw it as something to outgrow, or to compartmentalize as unserious, not professional (except maybe for suede elbow patches)— but thinking about it now, it seems like I just missed opportunities with articles of old clothing that I really loved.

I understand the importance of dressing respectfully, like wearing a suit in appropriate contexts, but do we consider mended clothes disrespectful? Darn it! I wonder when some influential political, business, or media figures will dare to appear professionally with visible mending, with all that it conveys, on their appropriately respectful clothes. That would be a statement.

Image Credit: Conner Prairie Museum Textile Collection

NEWS

FIBERSHEDS

• Fashion has a petroleum problem. Here’s how we can solve it, Reuters (April 28)

  • 70% of clothing fabric worldwide is made from petroleum, and industrial cotton uses petroleum-based fertilizers. In contrast, “farm to closet” production grows fibers non-extractively and makes supply chains traceable via QR codes on labels. An experimental farm in Italy does this at a commercial scale, restoring the soil rather than degrading it (discussed above).

• How Golden State Linen Is Reviving American Flax, Fibershed (April 14)

• Introducing Common Cloth Works, Resilience (April 1)

GOVERNANCE

• The Laws That Stop A Data Center From Coming To Your Town (or State), The Existentialist Republic (May 12)

  • New datacenters cause problems, but city councils (and state legislatures) can block them. A few dozen citizens can force a city council’s hand by bugging councilmembers for a written ban repeatedly via multiple channels, including channels that are recorded as public record and tied to upcoming legislative sessions. To help, they can also hand local electeds this one-pager.

• The Next Mayoral Imperative: Transforming the Core of City Government, Bloomberg Cities Network (April 17)

  • The siloed structure of most city governments prevents them from addressing interconnected challenges, but Stockholm pursues cross-department priorities, tracked by shared indicators. Their housing department doesn’t just report family eviction rates; they coordinate with social services and youth programs to prevent the evictions, moving the indicator downward.

HOUSING

• More Than Half of All Housing on Community Land Trusts in Canada Is Cooperative Housing, Shelterforce (April 27)

  • Many housing co-ops in Canada are on community land trust-owned land. In BC, a federation of 250+ housing co-ops created its own land trust. Co-ops on trust-owned land should be more common in the US. Successful examples include five large housing co-ops in Vermont, with a 40-unit co-op in Burlington, and seven small co-ops on rural Lopez Island in Washington state.

COMMUNITY WEALTH

• Cleveland: Where Community Wealth Building and the Arts Meet, Democracy Collaborative (April 29)

  • A Cleveland couple revived the legacy of Leo’s Casino, a landmark music venue that closed in 1972, by creating Leo’s Casino Arts & Music Collaboratory, a performing arts community and concert series. A nonprofit seeks to make it a more permanent cultural fixture that prospers through tickets, art sales, education, and as a prescribable venue for music therapy.

ENERGY

• Puerto Ricans Take Power Into Their Own Hands, Convergence (May 6)

  • After Hurricane Maria caused widespread outages, Puerto Rico’s AMANESER ran community workshops to install solar at half the price of commercial vendors and maintain the installations themselves. This catalyzed a new resilience consciousness, and now AMANESER runs workshops on rainwater harvesting, agroecology, and emergency communications.

• Local Policies to Get Buildings off Gas Keep Winning in Court, Canary Media (April 29)

  • In 2023, an appellate court struck down Berkeley’s ban on gas hookups for new buildings, favoring federal efficiency standards. Since then, numerous similar lawsuits have been filed to overturn local appliance codes, but almost all have gone the other way, upholding local authority. The newer decisions are supported by growing legal consensus and are expected to resist appeals.

PLACEMAKING

• A Women’s Social Movement That Started With a Sauna, Project for Public Spaces (April 30)

  • Inspired by a trip to Finland, a woman in a Milwaukee suburb installed a prefab sauna in her yard and sent an open invitation to her neighbors. It immediately became a favorite gathering space and turned into Shorewood Women’s Social, a community of women who host and attend free, low-pressure, real-life gatherings.

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