Climate change mitigation, adaptation, and finance: Rethinking the shameful trade flows of used textiles and the need to slow fast fashion

Abstract

Climate change has emerged as a global issue that possesses the capacity to become the preeminent concern of the century. Companies are widely seen as being at the heart of both the problems and the solutions to climate change. This has led to a fundamental rethinking of existing methods of production, which promote the notion that products are meant to be used only a few times and discarded. Spanning across various stages such as agriculture, petrochemical production, manufacturing, logistics, and retail, the clothes we wear have a significant impact on the environment throughout their lifecycle. In other words, while waste production can contribute to a variety of environmental issues, including greenhouse gas emissions, the production of waste from the clothes we wear is no exception. In 2021, Chile, for example, emerged as the fourth largest importer of used textiles and the first in Latin America. Currently, imports have already exceeded 126,000 million tons per year, with China, the US, and Korea being the main contributors to these imports. Nearly 40% of these items are imported through the Iquique free-trade zone in the northern Atacama Desert, where most are discarded since they have no value in the local second-hand clothing market. At present, if any, the industry suffers from a weak regulatory framework that fails to effectively regulate its operations. As a result, brands in the sector often rely on hollow promises, resulting in a phenomenon known as ‘greenwashing,’ where prominent brands make misleading claims about their sustainable practices. Drawing on doctrinal and comparative legal analysis, as well as systematic literature review methodologies, this study establishes the urgent need for immediate legal action to slow fast fashion and end the current practices of dumping low-quality second-hand clothing in regions of the Global South that lack the infrastructure to effectively manage such hazardous materials. On the whole, the study concludes that textile waste, similar to plastic waste, is clearly hazardous and, unfortunately, rather obscurely regulated.