Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) regulations are requirements put on producers of certain products to manage, organize, and/or pay for the pollution caused by a product throughout its life cycle. The responsibility thus extends into the post-consumer stage. Several industries have voluntarily undertaken or been required to adopt EPR measures. One such area is the textile industry.
Concerning the textile industry, textile waste continues to be considered a climate risk, and “fast fashion” has created increasing amounts of textile waste that are either placed in landfills or incinerated, causing a push towards EPR standards for textiles.
The staff of the Global Legal Research Directorate of the Law Library of Congress recently completed a comparative report, Extended Producer Responsibility for Textiles in Selected Jurisdictions. The report surveys jurisdictions that have adopted or are in the process of adopting EPR rules specifically for textiles, as well as jurisdictions that have special textile waste requirements. The report covers the following jurisdictions: Australia, Bangladesh, Belgium, the British Virgin Islands, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Croatia, the European Union, France, Ghana, Gibraltar, Guernsey, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Ireland, the Isle of Man, Italy, Kenya, Latvia, Malta, the Netherlands, New Zealand, North Macedonia, Pakistan, Portugal, the Russian Federation, Spain, Sweden, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom.
Among issues addressed by the report are mandatory and voluntary EPR schemes for textiles, collaborative textile industry initiatives, circular economy policies, and government action plans, as well as regulation of textile waste collection. The report consists of a comparative summary and individual country surveys.
We invite you to review the information provided in our report here.
This report is an addition to the Law Library’s Legal Reports (Publications of the Law Library of Congress) collection, which includes over 4,000 historical and contemporary legal reports covering a variety of jurisdictions, researched and written by foreign law specialists with expertise in each area. A search for legal reports on textiles identifies a number of relevant entries.
To receive alerts when new reports are published, you can subscribe to email updates and the RSS feed for Law Library Reports (click the “subscribe” button on the Law Library’s website). The Law Library also publishes articles related to “textiles” in the Global Legal Monitor.
In addition, a search of our blog, In Custodia Legis, using the term “textiles” may lead you to posts on a variety of related topics.
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