 Welcome, everyone. I am Monica Lennon, MSP, member of the Net Zero Energy and Transport Committee. I would like to welcome you all to the special online edition of the Festival of Politics 2021 in partnership with the Parliament's Think Tank, Scotland's Futures Forum. Today's panel is titled Fast Fashion and is held in partnership with Zero Waste Scotland. We are delighted that so many people are able to join us online today, and I look forward to hearing your comments and questions as we get into our discussion. Fashion is one of the world's biggest polluters. Even worse, 300,000 tonnes of yw's clothes are burned or buried in landfill annually. Much of that is unworn as manufacturers dispose of unsold stock. The UK is one of the worst offenders when it comes to buying disposable clothes, with the average person buying more clothes per capita than any country in Europe. How do we help fast fashion fans to understand why it is now time to make radical changes in our clothing manufacturing and buying habits? And what exactly are we asking people to do? Will this panel aim to address all of these questions in the next 60 minutes, so do stay with us? We are delighted that you are all able to join us to take part, and I would encourage you to use the event chat function to introduce yourselves by stating your name and your geographical location and posing questions that you would like to respond to. I am very pleased to be joined by our three excellent panellists. They are Lynn Wilson from Circular Economy Wardrobe, Gordon Renouff, co-founder and CEO of Good On You, an ethical brand rating app and Ian Gulland, chief executive of Zero Waste Scotland. I would like to begin by asking each of our panellists to describe exactly what is meant by the term fast fashion and to give us some examples that illustrate their definition. I will come first of all to Lynn, then to Gordon and then to Ian. Lynn, can I ask you to outline your thoughts, please, and welcome to you. Thank you so much, and it's such a pleasure to be here this morning talking on such an important critical topic, really, in terms of ethical environmental concerns. You've asked so much for the question of what's meant by the term fast fashion. As a term, fast fashion has evolved since the 80s, and it's used to describe a new accelerated fashion business model. What does that mean? It involves an increased number of new fashion collections every year, quick turn-arounds and often really low prices. It's about reacting rapidly to offer new products to meet consumer demand. This means that the brand's key focus and investment is in analysing consumer trends, such as fashion house runway shows, what celebrities are wearing and doing, and translating those styles very quickly so that they can produce them, sell them to the consumer before the original source of the trend, such as a celebrity, has moved on. It's the idea that no one can be seen in the same outfit twice. If you want to be popular in fashion, you must walk that look all the time. That, of course, leads to cheap production, exploitation of workers mainly in Asia, as you've mentioned at the start, Monica, but more recently seen in the UK in Leicestershire. From an environmental perspective, the industries have drained on global resources related to the vast amounts of energy, water and raw materials that are required to produce clothing. Some of the key high-street offenders are some of our best-loved brands at the moment. I'm currently researching at Glasgow University, and I'm sponsored by the Ethical Consumer Research Association. They recently did some research on high-street brands, and they measure ethics, sustainability and politics of a brand. They rated out of 20 brands like M&S and Primark between zero and three, and brands like Sheehan at a number four, whereas the best brand, Patagonia, was still at 10.5. That's a really poor rating in terms of taking the whole concept of fashion and how it impacts environmentally and from a people perspective and the politics of brands. Of course, there are some key offenders that such as Sheehan at the minute is one of the main offenders in terms of accessing young people through social media and using social media influencers. There are lots of jargon associated with that, such as having a brand drop, a fashion drop, where 70 to 100 Governments are dropped in the one week on to a website. It's about creating a frenzy, creating excitement for consumers to get ready for the drop, and clothing can be as much as £1.99 for a little wrap-top, and that's just not sustainable, either ethically or environmentally. Thank you. I'll pass over to my colleagues. Thank you, Lyn. Over to Gordon for his thoughts on fast fashion. Good morning, everybody. It's great to be here, coming from their way away. I hope my accent is able to be understood. I agree with everything Lyn said about the nature of the industry, the fast fashion industry, where it's come from. I think I'd add three interesting points. One is that another attribute of fast fashion is that it has a marketing campaign structured around that idea of you want stuff cheap, you want to be changing your fashion, changing your look all the time, that it's an essential part of your identity, that you've been doing that. A lot of people, particularly young people, buy into that, and so that's one of the elements that's very concerning. I think a second element is that, or if you think about why this is a problem, as Monica said, that the introduction of fashion is a large source of pollution in the current context leading up to the climate summit to COP. We know the UN Environment Programme has identified that fast fashion is responsible for 8% to 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and that's about the fifth most polluting industry in the world in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. Fast fashion has a lot of other impacts in terms of it's now, I think, more of an impact on forests through the use primarily of viscose than the paper industry. Like 30 years ago, we wanted to stop the paper industry chopping down on the trees and we've got much better at recycling and using sustainable forestry for that, but actually viscose is now a really important part of the forestation. So there are a lot of environmental impacts, a lot of impacts on workers, something like 80 million people work in the fashion industry and most of them women, most of them in developing countries, most of them in poor working conditions, even unsafe working conditions and very few of them pay the living wage. So we've got all these reasons why we have a problem. We've got all the things we've said about the character of the brands that do this. And I think one more thing is that what's changed, I think, in the last 10 years is that brands have become aware that they need to be saying something about their sustainability, that some of their customers are onto them and they have higher expectations. And so that gives rise to certain kinds of greenwashing. It also gives rise to a bit of a hierarchy in which fast fashion brands are doing stuff and which fast fashion are not doing anything by stuff, I mean positive steps for the environment and later. And so good on you rates more than 3000 fashion brands for their impact on people, plant and animals. And a lot of a large famous fast fashion brand scored two or even three out of five on our system. But a lot of the newer brands are scoring one. So in that ladder category, we're talking about brands like Fashion Noble, Romway or Sheehan, as Lyn has mentioned. And what we do see is brands trying to address some of their impacts and some of the bigger more established brands like H&M and Zara are doing more than some of these newer entrants like Sheehan and Fashion Nova. And what we see is a real kind of mix of doing stuff that's real and doing stuff which is greenwashing. So when a brand says, hey, we've got this organic cotton line, we're using sustainable materials, but it's only one percent, half a percent of their production. It gives them a nice glow. I feel good because I'm buying from a brand. I went into that shop because they have organic stuff, but actually I have much and I like that dress and that one and that one and none of them use organic cotton. So a researcher recently looked at Sheehan and they make tens of thousands of dress styles at a new one time and they go on about how they use good materials, for example, recycle content. She could count 64 dresses out of tens of thousands that actually use that preferable material. So I'll stop there. So the three points I'm making, they're marketing at you. They're having a really bad environmental labour impact and there's this emerging tend to position themselves as sustainable or slightly sustainable when they're not. Thank you, Gordon, and thank you for joining us from Australia today. I think Ian is next and he's, I think, still in Scotland. He's still quite close to where I am just now, but Ian, what does fast fashion mean to you? Yeah, no, thanks, Monica. I'm not sure I can add too much more from what the previous presenters have said. I mean, certainly from a zero with Scotland point of view, this fast fashion is now much more, well, very much aligned with the kind of throwaway culture that we have. We talk about this when we talk about plastics and litter, etc., and other products. Unfortunately, fashion has entered that sphere as well that we, in terms of the consumption and just people throw the stuff away. They use it once, they wear it once, as the other presenters have said, and then it just gets discarded and that obviously creates another problem in terms of sending stuff to landfill or, as you said, to burn it and causing far more problems in terms of pollution. So, certainly, anyway, in Scotland, we're very keen to halt that throwaway culture and address the whole issue of consumption, not just in fashion, but our consumption in fashion is contributing significantly to Scotland's carbon footprint. We produced a report earlier in the summer that, for every average person in Scotland, consumes 18.4 tonnes of materials every year. So, fashion is part of that, and that's a significance. So, scientists would say that a more sustainable level of consumption is eight tonnes per person per year, and we're obviously over double that. So, fashion makes up a big part of that, and, as other presenters have said, the impact of that now not just in climate change, but significant contributing to biodiversity loss through deforestation, et cetera. So, another crisis that we are all facing globally in terms of our natural system. So, our role in zero waste Scotland is set, obviously, like others, to point that out and work with individual companies to look at different models, circular economy models. So, we work with a number of companies to develop new business models around rental or lease companies just down from where I live in Stirling, Seoda, which rents out clothing to women's clothing, very ethically, just a new start company over the last 18 months. We also work with the Revolve Network, which has over 140 secondhand shops across the whole of Scotland who provide, and part of our Revolve Network is really to mainstream reuse, not just in clothing, but in furniture, and bikes, et cetera, in the high street, provide a very worthwhile shopping experience as well, which is part of that, raising the profile of reuse. We have seen that grow and develop over the certainly over the last couple of years, obviously, with the impact from Covid. So, our role is really to try and demonstrate that there are alternatives, alternative business models and, obviously, alternatives for consumers who are now, I think, there is a shift, I'm sure that we'll talk a bit more about that. I think that there is a much more shift from consumers wanting to produce their impact on climate change, wanting to shop more ethically for all the reasons that people have said around the ethics involved in this. So, there are solutions and it's really about how do we promote them and work with businesses to deliver them at pace here in Scotland. Thank you, Ian and Lennon Gordon, for your expertise, setting the scene very nicely. I just wonder then where is the high street right now in terms of ethical and sustainable clothing production here in 2021? Gordon, you've got your brand rating app. Perhaps I can come to you first of all on that. One of the first things that we would say is that to be a sustainable ethical brand, you need to be transparent about your impacts. You need to be telling consumers, other stakeholders, civil society, the population at large, what are your impacts on the things that matter? What are your impacts on climate, biodiversity, pollution, workers being paid properly and workers working in safe conditions and so on? So, we looked at how many of the high street brands, so we divide our ratings into larger store brands, so of the large brands, about two-fifths of the brands we've rated, many hundreds of brands. The first thing you need to do to be transparent is to know where your stuff is made. Can you trace your supply chain? Do you know where the cotton and polyester or discose or whatever in your supply chain is coming from? Do you know where it was processed, the textile mills? Do you know who's made your clothes? Now, not surprisingly, more than half know where the top tier of their supply chain, they know where the clothes are put together. In fact, 77% of large brands date that they can trace all of their top tier suppliers. But when it comes to their second tier, the textile mills, the processing of the fabrics or the first tier, it falls to 5%, less than 5% of those large brands, of 800 or so large brands, 1,000 large brands, can trace where their stuff is coming from. And if we look at how many are actually communicating this to customers, 25% are not even telling their customers which country the clothes are made in, let alone where the factories are or under what conditions they're made. And that's for the second tier and the first tier. Well, I don't even know, so it's not surprising that they're not telling us. So that, I think, is, you know, in terms of where they're going, they need to know more about their own supply chain before they can improve it. I think that's starting from a long way behind where they need to be. Thank you, Gordon. A really important point that you've made about transparency. I'll come to Lynne with the same question. Maybe you went to comment on what Gordon has said. Yeah, so Gordon has summed that up perfectly and I don't really have much more to add on that, but what I would like to do is take the conversation a wee bit further in saying and thinking about what is the high street offering for the consumer. So, at the moment, and Ian touched on this in terms of the things that Zero Waste Scotland do with Revolve, et cetera, the challenge is that we still have this linear retail model and so in terms of, yes, we can have transparency in the supply chain and we really need that. The consumer has virtually no accessible information at the moment in a way that a family of four can access it really quickly and make decisions quickly, but what we really need and what is missing from the high street are those rental models, those leasing models, those fashion libraries that allow this, don't encourage an instant culture, but allow a more free consumer culture with clothing that offer a more open offering that isn't just about owning something, that it allows the consumer freedom in a way that you just don't see on the high street right now. What is wonderful is that I do see in small communities in Scotland people setting up rental businesses both online and in the high street. There are some great new ethical and sustainable brands happening in Scotland and we just need to encourage more of that and we need to rethink the high street. In terms of Gordon setting out the issue, what does that look like from the consumer perspective, trying to access the high street and how do we start to encourage and tackle a new way of fashion consumption? Thank you. I hope that you don't mind me, Maureen Watt. You've briefly been back on mute there so I didn't catch all of that, Lynn. Oh sorry, I was just saying I hope that you don't mind me. Could you take an alternative take on the high street just to add on to Gordon because he did such a thing? No, it's great to get your unique perspective. Ian, you mentioned the revolve network, which I know from my local communities here in Lanarkshire, and you talked about Sioda. I just wondered, do you think that we're seeing enough of a momentum? We've got more fashion aware young people moving away from the high street in a traditional sense towards vintage shopping, we've got deep hop, we're seeing more interest in hiding wedding wear, formal wear, dresses and so on, but are we seeing enough momentum around that, Ian? Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, on a personal level, I think there is because I'm obviously, you know, Zero Ways Scotland, we work with businesses around this space and we work with consumers and also, you know, luckily I have two teenage daughters who shop vintage, who use deep hop and all these sort of things, so I'm very aware of that and I'm aware of these platforms and how they're developing. Clearly, it feels like there is momentum and I think that's very positive and I think that's what I would say is particularly being driven by younger people and, you know, the revolve network does help. It mainstream embraces a profile of second hand across Scotland and making it more accessible, but I think at the same time where, you know, online consumption is relatively easy, very easy for people to, you know, in terms of consumption and it's possibly been, you know, relied upon a lot during the kind of pandemic when we couldn't get out of the shop, so people are getting that. So it's almost like we're competing still. There's still a lot of easy throw away, you know, frameworks out there in terms of, you know, getting things quick and using them in wants and throwing them away. I do think momentum is shifting and I'm encouraged by that. I mean, going back to the points that Lynn is making, it is about the accessibility that they offer not just online but in the shops. Are the big retailers of the big brands, you know, giving information about this, talking about alternatives or even taking back themselves from shops prior to the pandemic? We're looking at that, even some of the means, the big retailers, we're looking at, you know, swapping and things of that, offering incentives for people to bring stuff back. So I think there's more of a role that they could do in terms of mainstreaming it. So it's not something you have to hunt out, you know, the second hand shops or such, like you see it much more in the mainstream. But I do think it's a bit of the offer and I think the transparency thing is really, yeah, I agree and we work with a lot of businesses, a lot of corporates in the structural economy space, not just in fashion. And I think there is a nervousness because they know that they need to get this right. But why they're not talking about it is because they know if somebody comes and asks them a question that they cannot provide the information. So there's a kind of real appetite at the moment for a lot of corporates to try and get that sorted. But in the meantime, you know, they'll say, look, we're not telling anybody because, you know, it's embarrassing because we don't know it. So I think there's a real shift and I think that is driven a lot by consumer pressure of saying, look, we really want to find out where this stuff is coming from and you need to tell us. So I think, well, that's another thing that is definitely happening at pace, I believe. But as I think it's been saying, all the transparency is great, you know, putting a label on it saying it's equal is brilliant. But if people just say, well, that's fine, I can just buy that and I can wear it once and throw it away, then it's not actually achieving what we're trying to do. And I think that's a little bit of the concern about transparency. Yes, we need to do it. Yes, we need to, you know, pressure on the brands. But ultimately, is that just going to make it more guilt-free for people to shop? Then that's still going to create significant problems globally in terms of the environment and possibly the knock-on effects in terms of throwaway cultures not going to be addressed. So we need to focus the upstream activity far more as well. Can I just add that it's definitely true that transparency is not a solution itself. It's a starting point and that once brands are transparent, you can start to address, assess how they are tackling the full range of material impacts, including to what extent they're engaging with the circular economy. So if you take good-on-use brand assessment methodology, for example, if brands will get a higher score if they offer resale programs, they'll have a higher score if they have long-lasting, high-quality garments, which is the other side of the circular economy thing, things that will in fact last. And so on, going back to your actual question about the, original question about the degree of interest, I mean, what's really interesting is, I mean, we have, and we're a small, tiny start-up for Australia, but we have one million people each month looking at our site, looking for information about sustainable fashion, looking to check out which brands are better. And I think the other thing is just to bring together something that Ian and Lynn have been saying, but from a consumer point of view, there's a lot of information out there. What should you think about the most? I think there are probably four things. One is, think about how you can consume in a more long-lasting way, and I think that has three elements. One is exactly what Lynn said, where appropriate, use a rental model or a resale model. The second one is, if it's your taste, get involved in repairs or even upcycling. So you can fix things. Back in my, I'm not so young, but back in my mother's day and my grandmother's day, there's a lot of fixing going on. You know, I was sitting around gendered as it was, fixing people's clothes. And that's not so common these days. So first one, buy and away for sustainable. First of all, buy high quality resale or rental and then secondly repair. And then the third one is when you do buy new buy from a sustainable brand. And just going back to the fast fashion mindset, sometimes people object to buying higher quality sustainable clothes on the basis that they cost more. The really interesting thing about fashion is that the price, we spend as households the same amount of money we spent on clothes 20 years ago. Seven percent of household income is allocated to clothing, same proportion 20, 30 years ago. But we buy four times as much stuff with that money. So the price has gone down by two, three, four hundred percent. And so what, if your mother or grandmother was teleported into today's 20 year old culture, they would not think that sustainable fashion was expensive. That would be the normal price for clothes. And so it's that marketing element saying you can't wear that anymore. You have to change it. You have to change it. That is an essential driver of this over consumption, I think, and something not to be forgotten. Thank you, Gordon. Now, this is all really fascinating, but we've got our audience with us today. Some people might be hearing something that's familiar to them, but others might be quite new to the topic. So we've got a really interesting point and question from Dewey, which I'm going to point to Ian to answer. It might be slightly technical, but we've made the points about transparency in terms of the manufacturers and the brands. I think that Dewey is finding it a little hard to accept, Ian, your contention, that each person discards eight tonnes of material a year. It does sound an enormous amount. Will you be able to clarify for Dewey the basis for that data? How are these measurements collated and how can we be transparent around that? Ian? We produced our report earlier in the summer, which is basically Scotland's material flow account, which basically understands all of the materials that we consume here in Scotland, or some of which, obviously, we export material to other parts of the world. Our total footprint in terms of material for Scotland is something in the region of 100 million tonnes that we consume into our economy, both from raw materials here in Scotland and imports. That 100 million tonnes goes into our economy, but that basically works out at 18.4 tonnes per person. It's our economy that is consuming it, but we, as part of that consumption, both independently as consumers, but also through the businesses and the public sector, spend as well. It's an average per person. It's really just demonstrating that Scotland is consuming way above the most sustainable level of eight. That's what scientists would say that the most sustainable for an economy is eight tonnes per person per year, but we are at 18.4. We are all responsible for that, not just what we do at home, but the wider economy as well. Driving cars or whatever, all of that consumes raw materials. The infrastructure that we use is deployed on our benefits and consumes materials. We have talked about legislation, transparency and labelling. I suppose that we miss labelling, because sometimes we see things marketed as organic or eco-friendly, but Gordon touched on the concept of greenwashing. I will come to Lynn first of all and then perhaps Gordon, but how important is legislation and enforcement around labelling? In the fixing fashion report that the UK Government was involved in, the fashion revolution and fashion campaigners were calling for a due diligence law. That due diligence law goes beyond the modern slavery act. That's about ensuring that brands are identifying their supply chain and making it public. Things like preventing modern slavery in the environmental pollution by knowing what's in their supply chain. Gordon is saying that, but putting that into a due diligence law. That is so that the brands can mitigate and ultimately account for how they manage what they are actually doing. It is also to act as a lever for the brands to be able to follow guidelines, to follow a law that they need to comply with, but it should be helpful for everyone. In relation to that, sorry, I've got some notes here. I just wanted to get my facts right, so that's why I've got some notes. It's the idea of something like a public database of companies, just like Gordon's company does at the moment where they are a non-profit Gordon or a for-profit company. It's a socially impactful profit. If something like that was mandatory for consumers where they could go and identify a brand and identify what they're doing, they also, in that report, recommended it for public procurement. I think that that is really interesting, given that, at the start of the global pandemic, CEPA reported that 6,000 tonnes of face coverings were estimated to have been landfilled in the first stage of the pandemic. The pandemic has, from a personal procurement perspective, a real impact on single-use devices, such as syringes and face coverings. What does that due diligence law mean for consumers in terms of our public sphere, as well as our own personal consumption, would be really important under that law? I think that, from my perspective, the idea of a due diligence law is something that could be looked into a lot further, and it could be something that Scotland could really champion. Thank you. Lynn mentioned CEPA, so for anyone who's not within Scotland, that's the Scottish Environment Protection Agency. Gordon, a due diligence law, do we need that? I think something like that is a good idea. You asked about, should we focus on claims that companies are making, which may be not entirely true or false. I think that is, partly, it's already the law, so it's really just a question of enforcement. I mean, companies may not mislead, but I think it's also perhaps an interesting issue, but it's not the core issue, which really is something like a due diligence law, or perhaps a different version of the same thing, which is saying that companies should be required to disclose their impacts on modern slavery or their impacts on carbon use. A law which says disclose your total CO2 emissions across your supply chain, that's quite a simple idea. It doesn't require the companies to produce in one way or another, it just requires them to tell us how they're doing it. This relates to a really important idea here. Sometimes when we think particularly about sustainability, we think, oh, those consumers, they're consuming all that stuff, they're very bad people, we should beat them up and make them feel guilty. Firstly, that doesn't work. Secondly, it's not the way I think about it at all, it's the opposite. We know that a majority of people say that they want to consume more sustainably. We know that about half of them actually feel bad when they're not able to consume more sustainably. The motivation is there. What's the problem is that it's actually hard to do, that's the first thing. Secondly, consumers do have competing priorities, and we have to think about how they relate together. Nobody goes out, nobody who says, hey, I want to be sustainable, goes out to buy a sustainable piece of clothing. They're going to buy a piece of clothing because they have a particular need that they perceive. They want to dress to wear to a party, they want to suit to wear to work, whatever it may be. The framing I think is much better is to say consumers, it's not you are obliged to buy the right stuff, it's you have a right to consume responsibly, you have a right to consume sustainably, and business and government need to support consumers to more easily exercise that right. A law which requires brands to be transparent, a much stronger modern slavery act combined with legislation which talks about other key issues like greenhouse gas impacts or forestation impacts, would be far more useful, I think, than simply policing full screen claims. That would give civil society, other companies, regulators and companies like mine, the information we need to provide consumers with really easy to use information which will help them to make more sustainable choices and in turn drive companies to do better simply because that's the way they're going to survive in the competitive marketplace. Thank you. Earlier on, Gordon, you talked about viscose and deforestation, so Francis has picked up on that and Francis is asking, well, she's saying it's a fascinating point about viscose and is asking, is there an alternative with the same properties and more be done to make this tree use more widely known about? Come to Gordon, but then I know Lynne, your textiles expert, so Gordon and Lynne, I don't know if Ian wants to add anything. So, I'll be really quick. I'm sure Lynne has some more detail knowledge, but the three most commonly used textiles, as I understand it, are polyester, which is basically oil and has big climate change impacts. Cotton, which is natural, inverted commas, but actually has a huge amount of impacts on the environment. If you think about cotton, it's a nice fluffy ball, and if you think about that nice shiny shirt you're wearing, it's kind of not fluffy anymore. So, to get from state A to state B, to grow it, it took a lot of water and pesticides, and to get to that state, it took a lot of chemicals. So, business as usual, cotton is a really big polluter. And then the third most common material is viscose, which is made by turning trees into a nice rayon-like fabric, well, rayon is a form of viscose. And so, you've got two issues there. One is the trees, you cut them down, that's kind of bad, particularly because they're old growth forest or they're not plantations. And secondly, to turn them into a fabric requires a lot of chemicals. And so, to be sustainable, you have to address both those things. So, some brands have made sure that the trees that they are using to create viscose are from FSC, Foreign Stewardship Council Certified Sustainable Forest. That's a good start. And other people are looking at making sure the chemical process is as little pollution as possible, as much of a close loop as possible. And so, there's a product called Tencel, which is not 100% the same as viscose in terms of its quality, but it's getting closer. Lyn will probably have more to say about that. So, just finally, for each of those three main materials, polyester, cotton, and viscose, I'm sorry, there is an alternative material which has half the greenhouse gas impact, which respectively are organic cotton, recycled polyester and Tencel. They're not perfect, those materials, but they're better than the business as usual material. Thank you, Lyn. Yeah, I mean, I think that's a really nice summary, Gordon, of what's going on in terms of fibres. And so, just to push that a little further, what's really interesting in the UK is a surge in people looking at growing hemp. And you might not be familiar with this, Gordon. In the UK, we have a programme called The Great British Sewing Bee, and there's a chap called Patrick Grant from The Great British Sewing Bee. And I know that Patrick, in his site in the north of England, has started a hemp project. So, he's going to grow the hemp to see how much of a garment they can get from this hemp. And it is an experimental project, but it is about this idea of demonstrating what the value of a fibre is. So, whilst we can ask about the properties of viscose compared to polyester or cotton, the actual question is, what do we want to do with this fibre? Where are we going to use it? How's it going to be used? And how long is it going to be used for? So that there are some things that we do need in fast cycles. There are some things that we need in much slower cycles. So, it's really evaluating with all of these different fibres what's the best use of them and to ensure that they have a second life after we've used them. So, I think that the idea of addressing head-on in the UK, what are we doing with fibre? How can we get back to natural fibre by growing our own is really interesting. Those are, of course, micro-projects. They are not the answer, but they help us to identify potential new fibre streams. I think that because we are so polyester dependent, over 63 per cent of the clothing that we wear is polymer-based. I think that, even as consumers, we maybe don't understand that that polymer base is the same base as in a plastic bottle, which is why we can reprocess polyester clothing back into new clothing as we can with plastic bottles. We know that we can only do that two or three times. It's not an infinite loop. Potentially, as technology goes forward, it might become an infinite loop, but we don't have that for sure. However, what we need is a much more broad range of fibres and understanding what we want them to do so that we reduce our need for polymer-based fibres and reduce our need for oil. I hope that that's added further. Thank you. Thank you. It's great to have all your contributions today. Ian, do you want to add anything to that? I have a couple of points. I'm going back to a previous answer from Gordon about consumers. Absolutely, I think that it's too easy to blame consumers about what he said. I don't think that people don't get up with a particular purpose to go and trash the planet or to support slavery. That's not what people do. People are really keen to make the right choices but are hampered in a way that we're talking about in terms of the system that they're confronted with. It's the same. We have the same discussion with consumers about food-based, the whole aspects of how food is presented to them at retail level. It is about how do we help them to make—how do we change the system, but how do we also offer up alternatives? That comes back to things like buying second hand and making these things much more available to us all. I was taking some notes about the due diligence law that you were talking about, Lyn and Gordon. As you all know, Monica, the opportunity in terms of things to go into the proposed circular economy bill here in Scotland, which is being put forward by our Government. Obviously, there's no timetable for that yet, but we should be thinking about how we can use that enabling legislation here in Scotland to create much more circular economy in Scotland. We should address some of those issues, not just about how do we restrict things, but how do we open up opportunities for people to become more circular? That's really interesting. I'm not a fibre expert, but I'm interested in that. As Lyn will know, the whole plastic bottles opportunity to go back into other things such as textiles across the wider piece. One of the things that we're very interested in is that Scotland has moved to on-board, on-shore, quite a lot of healthcare protection equipment in terms of plastics in the back of the pandemic. There's an opportunity for reusing plastic material from our waste streams, both at household and industrial levels, to get that back into PPE equipment, which can be used and then recycled again. That is a potential opportunity around the circular economy, as we look to build a resilience in our supply chains around PPE equipment and using the raw materials that we already have in our waste streams. That makes perfect sense. I want to stick with you for a moment longer, because we've talked a lot about what Governments can do in terms of legislation and enforcement, but we've got a question from Arlene, and she's asking, should Governments introduce higher rates of tax on fast-fashion companies and their products to encourage companies to move away from high-volume or around products? That's a good question. Again, it could matter whether you penalise or incentivise. Clearly, there are conversations in other countries around introducing levies on fast-fashion or fashion full-stop and creating an almost extended producer responsibility at school, putting some responsibility on fashion brands and retail to provide the money to provide the collection infrastructure, to create more closed-loop approaches to fabric reprocessing, etc. That is a potential opportunity, but the other thing that we are quite keen on is how we can reduce taxation, particularly things such as VAT, to encourage more reuse and repair. It's a pilot in Sweden where they've reduced that on exactly that reuse, repair both in terms of textiles, furniture, bikes, you name it, and to encourage more not just social enterprises but entrepreneurs to get into that space. Again, it's not so much taxing the bad, but how do we incentivise the good? That's where people are looking. Where is the incentive for me to be a part of that, both as a business and as an entrepreneur, potentially, and also as a consumer? Incentivising people in that space is that we can get much further without changing tax systems full-stop. Even business rates, local business rates and things like that are being creative to create more of a reuse, repair hub or infrastructure at a local level. How do you incentivise more? You mentioned high streets at the beginning of the discussions, so how do we create more space for those people to provide those services and have much more accessible to the consumer in the first place? We are getting into carrots and sticks here. I will come to Lyn and Gordon briefly, because we have lots of other questions to come through. Lyn and Gordon, your thoughts on what you have just heard? I mean reducing something, incentivising renting and leasing. That's something that's being really looked into. We have a fantastic company in Scotland called ACS Clothing, and it's a rental service company that provides cleaning services for the whole of the UK. They are really advocating for taking the BAT off of rental and encouraging the consumer in that kind of way. I'm really for incentivising more so. I probably know more about incentivisation than taxation. I think that anything that really benefits the consumer is the way forward. One perspective I can add to that is that the ability of the consumer to find a sustainable option varies a lot in the categories of clothes and the price points. People will often say it's hard to find sustainable options at lower prices, and that's a particular challenge, but there are particular kinds of products and other aspects of clothing which are not well-addressed by existing sustainable fashion brands. Plus sizes is quite hard to find sustainable fashion in a plus size. We have found that one of the items that's most searched and good on you is in fact shoes, but there are many less sustainable shoe brands than there are. I think some government support in terms of guidance to the interview saying, hey, when you're thinking about, I think the problem is that people go away and they think, I'm going to start a fast fashion brand, and they think of two things first. They think of, okay, so that means organic cotton, and that means t-shirts, right? There are a lot of organic cotton t-shirt brands out there. We don't need any more organic cotton t-shirt brands right now. What we do to these brands that are doing, like a really creative brand that I know is saying, okay, your child is growing and you don't feel like spending a lot of money for your three-year-old because they're going to be four soon and they're not going to be wearing that. So what are the systems around that, and of course, clothes swaps and so forth are good, but brands which say, actually, you give us that back and we will give you the next size, like for nothing or for 10% or something, or even making clothes which expand. I mean, there's some great options there. So there are very specific problems that are opportunities for businesses, and so I think some work by government or others, including us, to kind of highlight that opportunity is a really interesting way for it. I just want to say one thing about looking at recycling pet bottles that Ian mentioned. I said before that the recycle polyester is roughly speaking 50% less greenhouse gas emissions than regular polyester, but unfortunately, it's equally bad on the microplastic issue. That is small shedding of fibres that get into the water stream, in particular getting to fish and getting glass when we eat the fish. So there's a difference between, so recycle products which get washed a lot have that problem. So active wear made out of recycled polyester, maybe that's not great. Recycle products which tend to get hand washed like swimwear, much less bad. Recycle products which Ian almost never washed like shoes. So let's focus on making some sustainable shoes out of recycled pet because that would also not have that unwanted secondary attribute. I'm going to try and squeeze in a few more questions, so I won't come to every panel member. Just really quickly, this is for Lynn. Rabina is asking, should wool be used more widely? Again, it goes back to my point of what's it for. So wool is a brilliant insulator. We have real issues with fuel poverty at the moment and so, of course, we should all have really good wool products. It's a challenge because to get a really good wool product that's 100 per cent wool biarex can be expensive. So wool is really important but again, the challenge is that consumers don't often realise that they're not buying wool and because we have such sophisticated fibre systems at the moment, we can be hoodwinked into thinking we're buying wool when we're actually buying polyester that doesn't have the same insulating properties. Wool is a wonderful fibre and it is a travesty that farmers in the UK cannot get money for their fleece and so it's just un-economic for them to sell their fleece, so they have to burn it. So the idea of bringing back more wool production in the UK would be a really fantastic thing but it has so many challenges but what we do see is we see smallcroft communities, smallcrofters developing new fibres along the animal chain, whether it's alpaca or yak or llama, as well as wool fibres and so again, these small batch manufacturers who then can create these fabulous products, I think the challenge is that they are then quite expensive, so that's when we can potentially look at a seasonal wardrobe, can we lease a seasonal wardrobe, can we lease our woolens, how do we circulate them more, so again it goes back to what is it that we want wool to do, it is one of our key most important fibres but it's working with design and consumption to work out what we want it to do. Thank you Lynn, I just want to pick up on a question and a comment really from Margaret Caldwell who's joined us today. Margaret is a concerned consumer and she feels that the fast fashion industry is exploitative both in terms of production and marketing and nothing she's hearing makes her change that opinion but she is glad to hear of initiatives to challenge that. We have touched on it briefly because we only have 60 minutes today but we know that sustainable fashion has a close link with the labour unions and interests in this exploitation of government workers around the globe. I wonder if Gordon, just maybe in a few seconds, can you say are we still seeing these big brands wediw to their profit margins or are we seeing an improvement in government workers terms and conditions? I think we can, so I'll try to be really quick. So 2013 terrible disaster in Bangladesh, many people died of the factory collapse and the fashion revolution movement was born and this focus on transparency was born and there has been a lot of steps forward in transparency about supply chains by many but not all brands. But saying that over the last eight, nine years I would say that we've made more progress on environmental issues than on labour issues and some of the big brands including HM made promises to pay living wages to workers which they by a certain time frame which they'd failed to meet and sort of admitted that and some of the promises pay to the way and so and then came COVID and we had the first thing that the fashion brands did when they were losing sales was to cancel orders and they had terrible impacts on workers in the supply chain who whose bosses were not getting paid and so they weren't getting paid by the mills or the company truth factories in Bangladesh and Cambodia and so on. So there is still a lot, you know, I would say there's more awareness around it, there's more commitment to transparency from a substantial minority of the industry leaders but there's a long way to go into actually delivering their working conditions. You know, so there's been a few bright spots but you know, we're not there. Thank you, Gordon. Well, I'm afraid we're going to have to move on so we can come to some closing remarks but I want to thank everyone for their comments and questions. A nice comment from Sharon in the event chat. Ian mentioned Zero Waste Scotland's work with the Revolve Network and Sharon is saying that she donated the majority of her mother's clothes to Revolve and linked with the local women's aid so that they could use the points. So thank you, Sharon, for sharing that with us. Thank you all for your contributions. Before we come to close the event, I would like to give each of our panellists just one minute to sum up the issues raised in our discussion today and if I can begin with Ian, we'll then move to Lynn and end with Gordon. If we can unmute Ian, we'll hear from him. Am I unmuted now? Yes, thanks, and thanks for the opportunity again. It's that issue. I mean, I guess what we're trying to do is to some extent show that there is an alternative to fast fashion or, as one of the presenters talked about, exploitation to some extent of what consumers are thinking. So that's what it's about for us. There is an alternative, you know, that is trying to give opportunities here in Scotland to grow and develop, both as a business and as a social movement as well, and giving more power to the consumer, to some extent, to make the right choices. I think that I probably haven't talked about the cost of fashion. We should all use what we already have. I think that there's a statistic around that the average UK household has £4,000 worth of clothing in their wardrobes, a third of which we haven't worn in a year. So there again, just before we even start thinking about where we're going to buy stuff, use what we've already got in our wardrobes. It's valuable clothing now. Thank you, Ian and Lynn. Thank you. I attended the talk by George Mombio at the Festival of Politics the other night, and he has a fantastic concept that I think really can be applied to fashion. He says, private sufficiency, public luxury. I think that private sufficiency is what Ian is talking about, that 30 per cent reduction in the 30 per cent of the average wardrobe was never worn. How do we really support our users' consumers and new consumers to understand what sufficiencies do we need in our wardrobes about education? Public luxury is about ensuring quality, that everybody has the right to quality and that we don't have this low-grade, low-quality fashion any more. We have this clothing that should be a public luxury, that then supports us with things that basic human needs, keeping us warm, keeping us cool, keeping us dry, keeping us safe. All of these basic human needs are really what clothing is about and we need to get back to that public luxury position. Thank you. I just want to say two things that consumers can think about doing at one thing government should do. Just building on everything that's been said, one of the ways to make sure we don't have things in our wardrobe that we don't wear is to be better and more mindful shoppers. Two rules of thumb. One is look at something and you ask yourself, will I wear this x number of times? Will I wear this 20 times? If the answer is no, maybe don't buy it. The second thing is don't look at the sticker price, look at the price per wear. So if you see something, you look at it, you think I'm only going to wear that twice. That means it costs £5 per wear or £10 per wear and you look at something else, the woolen items that Linda's talking about, it's 50 quid. But actually I'm going to wear that 20 times a year for the next five years. That's 100 times. So it's, whatever that is, 50p per wear and so it's 10 times cheaper than the five or 10 pound skirt that was going to fall apart next week. So that's two things for consumers and very quickly for government. I think just reiterating, making it easy for consumers, most of whom want to do the right thing to do that, starting point is obligation to be transparent on brands. Thank you. Thank you and we must end there. So I'd like to thank you all for joining us today and making such a big contribution to our panel brought to you in partnership with Zero Waste Scotland. I'd like to thank our excellent panel, Lynn Wilson, Gordon Renouff and Ian Gullans, for giving up their time and to take part. Finally, I take the opportunity to remind you that later on today we have panel discussions about climate activism and this is not a drill. Then it's 7.30pm tonight, an in-conversation with the world-renowned scientist Professor Suzanne Simard, who is revolutionary work on the world of trees and being made into a Hollywood biopic. Tomorrow we have discussions on everything from mental health to resilient cities and inventions to save the world from the climate crisis. I do hope that you can enjoy these discussions and enjoy them. Goodbye from us. Thank you and take care.