Our Impact In 2022 And What's Next

Last week, we launched our Impact Report for 2022.  Fashion Roundtable have consistently been the first to address the challenges of Brexit; Covid-19; climate change; exploitative working practices; Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR); VAT reduction for sustainable businesses; issues around fibre and localism; and inclusion in fashion. We use our platform to highlight inequalities across the fashion industry and to effect long-lasting social, business and environmental change. 

VAT reduction 

Fashion Roundtable collaborated with the team at ACS to produce a report for the Treasury on the viability for VAT reduction for sustainable fashion businesses in the UK. The report included background on the fashion sector and its contribution to the UK economy and employment numbers, depiction of sustainability in fashion and its differing definitions, business models, and opportunities. Read more. 

Wool 

Over the past year and a half, Fashion Roundtable have been developing a strategy for wool in the UK, speaking and connecting with individuals and organisations around the country who work in the wool industry - be that farmers, makers, spinners, dyers, iconoclastic stakeholders, brands, and many more. In 2022 this culminated in a collaboration with Mentor Môn to host a Wool Roundtable in order to further gather views, ideas, suggestions and solutions on how to combat the effects of Brexit, Covid, and decreasing wool prices on the sector, its farmers, and creatives. The key finding from this space was that amongst the challenging statistics that there is real creativity, potential, and excitement that can be built from having sustainable wool supply chains feeding into fashion and design. However, wool’s clear provenance story was the most obvious missed opportunity and an area which merino wool was currently dominating in. Read more. 

Waste Strategy 

The Waste Strategy Report was developed in response to a request from DEFRA and examines the challenges and opportunities in the development of an Extended Producer Responsibility policy for textiles in the UK. The report compares and contrasts similar policies being implemented, or due for implementation across other countries and groups, including the EU. Brought together by sustainability experts in our Sustainability and Social Justice Committee, they developed a red and green light system to identify the challenges (red) and provide solutions (green). Key takeaways include the need to consider potential unintended consequences e.g. if exports to Global South become a cheap work around, worsening the crisis of dumped textiles already created. Read more. 

Our CEO, Tamara Cincik, said: 

"The end-of-life story for our clothes is going to be the next big issue facing businesses and consumers. We all thought for many years that giving to charity, or putting items in the recycling bin was enough. Clearly, given the work of The Or Foundation and other organisations in the Global South, it isn’t.

“We hope that our analysis and subsequent report will support The Government towards legislation which enables the industry towards greater sustainability and transparency targets, as we are seeing in the EU with their strategy for sustainable and circular textiles."

Next Steps 

As promised in our 2021 Impact Report, we took the recommendations we made, and research we developed and pushed for change and innovation. We engaged with ministers, members, government departments, CSOs, and many more throughout our industry. We have seen successes, but that change cannot come in a year, and our next steps for 2023 will be much the same, if not doubling down, on our efforts of the past year.

We will continue to follow through on our key recommendations from Cleaning Up Strategy (built upon by our three reports from 2023) and R&I reports to further the potential of the sector and its employees, and to decrease its environmental impacts. Testing and implementation are key to understanding and convincing others of the potential behind many of these solutions. In the year ahead we look to continue to partner and collaborate with researchers and pilot projects that can demonstrate what wider roll outs of policy can achieve.

Click through to read our Impact Report in full here.