Durability is moving from a product-quality consideration to something regulators increasingly want brands to define, measure and eventually communicate to consumers. Europe is driving much of this change, with durability appearing across policies and initiatives. But pinning down what constitutes longer-lasting is challenging. Currently, the EU is grappling with questions around wears, washes and which signs of wear should count.
Beyond inducing the industry to create longer lasting garments, the goal is to change consumer behavior. But that starts with devising a way to clearly communicate a product’s durability. WRAP—The Waste and Resources Action Programme—is working on a solution.
“What we found is because consumers don’t know how long stuff is going to last, there is a tendency that they may dispose of it early, and sometimes dispose of it into landfill,” said Mark Sumner, program lead for textiles for circularity NGO WRAP. “An independent standard that’s on the garment at point of sale or on the website would be a really useful tool, and we think that that has real powerful implications for circularity.”
Here, Sumner discusses where policy is headed, why some proposed thresholds may be too low and the work underway to bring a standard to market sooner than later.
HGI: How is the current policy landscape addressing durability?
MS: European policy, in particular, is being used by a lot of brands worldwide as the likely policy shape across most regions. The European Union has got the [Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation] ESPR framework, which addresses how to increase the longevity of product. And the best way to increase the longevity of product is to think about durability, which is a good start. Most of the focus is on physical durability, the ability of the garment to retain its function. There’s been quite a lot of conversations about emotional durability, which is essentially how in love you are with your garment, how likely are you to keep it and wear it. Very hard to predict and map but very important to focus on.
Within the European Union, there are different directives and frameworks that are all trying to work and fit together. Feeding into ESPR, we have the Joint Research Centre, who is providing the technical insights. We’ve also got the product environmental footprint [PEF] category rules, which has also talked about setting a durability level. Most people are talking about extended producer responsibility [EPR] and linking that to durability as well, plus there’s a little bit connected with digital product passports [DPPs].
HGI: How are these policies defining durability?
MS: What we’re also seeing within the European Union is they’re trying to work out what an acceptable level of durability could or should be that would be adopted by the industry. The original standard was quite high. The standards in policy have come down.
The functional unit that they’re using to define durability is linked to wash cycles for which a product would retain its function. I like that because we know washing garments is quite damaging to their long-term performance. One of the proposals at the moment is the durability standard measured in number of washes should be only five washes. We don’t believe that’s good enough for a consumer point of view. Everything that we’ve tested in our project, over 200 different garments, passes at five washes.
What we tend to hear from consumers, both in the States, in Europe and in the UK, is “I think it should be 50 washes.” One level up from that is the PEF, which is slightly more aspirational, and that’s talking about 15 to 20 washes.
HGI: Outside of washes, from a consumer perspective, how can someone tell if a garment is durable?
MS: Price does not provide an indication of durability. You can have product that is expensive and has a very good performance in terms of durability. You can also have product that is expensive, and it is really poor in terms of durability. Composition also doesn’t provide enough indication about the product durability, neither does fabric weight correlate to overall performance. It’s slightly weaker in terms of that statement. For certain types of product, weight can be more of an influence, but for others, it’s not.
Q: What is WRAP focused on?
MS: We’re looking at how you measure product durability around the number of washes, but we’re also talking about measuring durability in terms of a garment’s ability to retain its appearance when abraded. We know from research that people will discard clothing because it’s pilled really badly. With denim, products end up being thrown away because the abrasion leads to a hole. White garments get grimy. Black or dark navy garments can fade quite quickly. What our project has done is determining how to add all of those things together to try and get a score or a rating for the product.
We’ve been working on understanding how we can do the measurement and the assessment. What we’ve been really clear about is making sure that the work we do links back to policy. Where we differ from policy is what level the standard comes in at.
HGI: Tell us about your proposed standard.
MS: What we’re also talking about now is how do we help consumers make informed choices? And one of the things that we’ve talked about is creating an independent durability standard that means something to the consumers.
What we believe with a durable product that has an independent label on it that says “this product can perform 50 washes,” you’re going to get more people buying it than the non-durable. And we think the consumer psychology suggests that they will use it for longer, and when they’re finished with it, we believe there’s a stronger chance that they will then donate it to charity or sell it on a peer-to-peer platform.
HGI: What’s the timeline for introducing a standard like this?
MS: I would hope that this time next year we are in a position where the standard is live, and potentially we’ve got marketing going. What we’ve got to build up is that legal framework. We need to make sure that we’ve addressed all of the potential greenwashing challenges around it, and then find the right way of communicating with consumers.
