Breakdown of The Textile Waste Reduction Act

Millions of tons of textiles are discarded each year, and most end up in the trash. These cheap textiles are often plastic garments that take hundreds of years to decompose. Sadly, despite fast fashion's harmful impacts driving the increase in textile waste, little coordinated federal effort has addressed the problem or supported a more circular textiles economy.

However, Chellie Pingree has introduced the Textile Waste Reduction Act, TWRA. This is described as the first coordinated federal framework to reduce textile waste, improve data collection, and develop a national strategy to advance circularity in the textile industry. 

If you don’t know who Congresswoman Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) is, she founded and chairs the Slow Fashion Caucus, which she launched in June 2024. This is the first-ever U.S. government caucus dedicated to reforming the fashion industry and curbing fast fashion waste.

It has also received support from American Circular Textiles, the Garment Worker Center, Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project, Patagonia, ThredUp, and sustainable fashion designers. 

Pingree is also a Ranking Member of the House Appropriations Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Subcommittee, which oversees the EPA. 

Yet this Textile Waste Reduction Act would direct the administrators of the Environmental Protection Agency to take appropriate actions to advance textile circularity. 

The legislation's main functions would be to do the following: 

• Require the EPA to make a National Textile Circularity Strategy 

  • Create an Interagency Working Group on Textile Circularity to coordinate federal activities 

  • Establishes an Advisory Board to provide recommendations to the Interagency Working Group 

• Directs the EPA to take federal action to advance textile circularity 

• Requires EPA to identify and publish federal funding opportunities that support textile circularity

• Requires EPA to annually publish updated data on textile waste generation and management

The Act would initially identify the actions, data, and funding needed to implement the National Textile Circularity Strategy. It would also develop a methodology to collect the data identified in the needs assessment, including the types of data needed to implement the National Textile Circularity Strategy and the scope and scale of textiles that are landfilled, combusted to recover energy, recovered, or exported. 

An interagency group, the Interagency Working Group on Textile Circularity, would coordinate federal activities to advance textile circularity, including developing and implementing the National Textile Circularity Strategy. It would have an Advisory Board to provide recommendations to the Interagency Working Group. 

This group would oversee analysis of textile repair, reuse, recovery, recycling, and hauling at the local government level in the United States. The act would also identify entities involved in textile repair, reuse, recovery, recycling, and hauling. Plus, it would identify federal laws, financial assistance, and incentives that support textile repair, reuse, recovery, recycling, and hauling. 

This would aim to build an understanding of the economic conditions related to textile circularity and the potential to create or scale viable end-markets for pre-owned textiles, or textiles resulting from textile recycling, at the local, regional, and global levels. 

It would also include an analysis of the potential economic effects of textile circularity, any federal, state, and local legal barriers, and any gaps in legal authority that hinder implementation of the National Textile Circularity Strategy or scaling textile recycling, along with potential solutions. 

This would potentially include looking into the cost of recovering textiles and developing any infrastructure needed to implement the National Textile Circularity Strategy or scale textile recycling, workforce needs; funding solutions; and an identification of any need by the public for education on textile circularity, and methods by which the Administrator may provide such education.

After two years from the date of enactment of this Act, the National Textile Circularity Strategy would be submitted to Congress.

It would then be continuously updated, with reports and lessons learned from implementing the National Textile Circularity Strategy submitted in the year before each report.

The EPA would publish all findings submitted to Congress for the National Textile Circularity Strategy on its website. 

Support has emerged for this act, including ThredUp's endorsement for the fashion industry. The Textile Waste Reduction Act would be the first legislation to coordinate a national circular fashion framework.

It would formally begin investigating fast fashion's impact and lead the way in formal sustainability reporting in the industry.

Let me know if you agree that this would transform the fashion industry by finding efficient and sustainable solutions to its issues.

XOXO,

Ellie Rose