Introduction
The textile sector isn't just about style; it's the frontline in the battle against the triple planetary crisis of climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss. Each year, the textile sector is estimated to be responsible for:
The textile sector is incredibly complex; it is important for personal expression and cultural identity, and we also can’t survive without it. It creates livelihoods and opportunity for millions of workers, but it also harms the very workers it relies on, while having significant environmental impacts at every stage of its life cycle.
All these challenges and impacts point towards the need for a circular textile sector.
The approach of UNEP
UNEP has identified textiles as a high-impact sector, not only due to its significant environmental and social impacts but because it exemplifies many common challenges for other sectors on value chain visibility, overconsumption and overproduction, and circularity. UNEP uses the term ‘textiles’ as it includes the use of all textile products, including ‘fashion’ (focusing on trends), ‘garment and footwear’ (clothing and apparel), ‘home textiles’ (bedding and upholstery), and ‘technical textiles’ (used in medical, transport or construction industries).
The One UNEP Textile Initiative provides strategic leadership and encourages sector-wide collaboration to accelerate a just transition towards a sustainable and circular textile value chain. It has outlined the imperative for the fashion sector to become radically and rapidly transformed to become circular and encapsulates and aligns all UNEP work on textiles to do so.
In five years, UNEP wants to ensure that:
Key Resources
- Stocktaking Report – this 2020 report provides an analysis of the environmental and socio-economic hotspots along the entire value chain, and looks at a range of associated impacts, as well as how different stages in the value chain are dominant in different impacts.
- Roadmap Report – this 2023 report builds on the analysis of the Stocktaking report by providing a Roadmap for all stakeholders to address these environmental and socio-economic hotspots through a circular textile sector. It has stakeholder-specific annexes that outline the key priorities and actions for each stakeholder (including brands and retailers, producers, policymakers, innovators and recyclers, NGOs and communicators).
- The Sustainable Fashion Communication Playbook - this 2023 report is for communicators (so Marketing/PR/Communications managers of brands, but also influencers, journalists, etc) to redirect communication on fashion towards sustainable and circular solutions, including countering greenwashing and shifting the narrative around overconsumption and what is valued.
Our work:
- Innovative Business Practices and Economic Models in the Textile Value Chain (InTex) project
- Circularity and Used Textile Trade Project
- Reducing uses and releases of chemicals of concern, including persistent organic pollutants (POPs), in the textiles sector
- UNEP's Textile Expert Community
- UNEP Sustainable fashion communication activities
- UNEP Circularity Platform - Textiles sector
- The United Nations Alliance for Sustainable Fashion
- Engaging the Textile Industry as a Key Sector in SAICM – A review of PFAS as a Chemical Class in the Textile Sector
