Will Consumers Pay for the True Cost of Clothes?

The UK Government is currently reviewing their circular economy policy, and Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) for textiles is firmly on the agenda. EPR is the principle that the companies who put products onto the market should pay towards the collection and recycling of those products at end of life. Despite the Conservative government rejecting this proposal in the UK Parliament’s Environmental Audit Committee Fixing Fashion report, everyone is now agreed on the principle. The critical question now is what the fee should be and whether consumers will accept it.

Until now, no one had actually asked UK shoppers. WEFT, an independent organisation working on the development of a fair textiles EPR system, and partners remedied this in 2024 with four focus groups and a survey of 2800 nationally representative UK adults who had bought clothing in the past six months. The findings make interesting reading.

What the research found

A charge of £0.50 per item would go largely unnoticed, even on low-cost clothing. Consumers were unlikely to notice a charge of £1 per item on garments above £40. Even higher charges – up to £5 per item – were needed before they began to influence decisions between more and less sustainable products. Responses were consistent across all income groups. A visible charge in the range of £0.50–£1 per item could raise £2–4 billion a year for textile collection and recycling infrastructure in the UK based on estimates of a whopping 4 billion items of clothing and accessories sold annually.

Perhaps more interesting than the numbers is what influenced consumer acceptance of this charge. Transparency matters. Over 80% of those surveyed supported having the EPR charge clearly shown at the point of purchase. A traffic-light style label – green for low environmental impact, red for high – was far more popular than simply showing a number. When people understood the charge and its purpose, they were more likely to use the information to guide their purchases. Over 70% indicated they would like to see this charge introduced.

Language also matters. Focus group participants preferred the word charge over fee and were more comfortable when the purpose of the charge was clearly explained.

For independent and sustainable brands, this research has an interesting implication. The biggest barrier to consumer action on sustainability is not unwillingness but invisibility – the failure to connect a purchasing decision to its consequences. The WEFT research suggests that when the connection is made clear and when the mechanism is trusted, people are willing to act on it. This is not so different from the conversations you’re already having with your customers when you explain why your garment is worth what it costs and why it’s worth investing in something you will keep for years. Making the invisible visible is a skill you’ve already developed.

Sustainability (excluding durability) was cited as a purchase influence by 19% of respondents. When sustainability criteria included durability, that figure rose to 59%. This suggests that the sustainable fashion argument lands best when it begins not with environmental credentials but with the simple proposition that well-made things are worth paying for. In short, it’s about value proposition.

Read the full policy briefing at weft.org.uk

 

Durability: The Foundation for Circularity

Ask most people how to identify a durable garment and they may well reach for the same heuristics: a higher price, a trusted brand name, a heavier weight of fabric, a natural fibre. A three-year research project by WRAP and the Leeds Institute of Textiles and Colour involving 25 brands and more than 200 garments across over 10,000 test specimens has now established something the industry perhaps suspected: none of these are reliable indicators. Across all product categories tested, there was no correlation between price and durability performance. Fabric composition, fabric weight and brand reputation proved equally unreliable as proxies. Over 40% of the brands involved ranked top for at least one product category across the full spectrum from high street to supermarket value ranges.

What the research also found is that proposed EU durability legislation, while welcome as a floor, sets the bar too low to drive meaningful change. Most products tested already meet or exceed those minimum requirements. Consumers expect garments to last beyond 50 wash and dry cycles, yet current policy proposals require testing at only 5–15 cycles – too few, the research shows, to predict how a garment will actually perform over its lifetime.

For independent brands, the actionable finding is that durability is not a given, whatever the materials or price point. (Indeed, I recall a dress I once bought from a sustainable brand no longer operating that was unwearable after the first wash.) Durability emerges from the interaction of design, materials and construction. The research provides standardised testing protocols that make it possible, for the first time, to measure and benchmark your own products’ performance. Once tested, that evidence becomes something most of the market cannot offer: a credible claim that your garments are built to last – with the data to back it up.

Read the executive summary at wrap.ngo

BOOK REVIEW

The Drip: Voices on Water, Labor, and Sustainability in the Fashion Industry
by drip by drip

Water runs through a garment, from the cotton field to the dyehouse to the washing machine. And it runs through most sustainability strategies too – straight off the page. Water is the fashion industry’s most significant environmental impact, yet most brands treat it as an afterthought. This publication sets out to change that.

 

 

This collection of eight essays published by Berlin-based non-profit drip by drip includes contributors from research, trade unions, sustainability consultancy, supply chain strategy and environmental science. Most come from South Asia – the region that makes a substantial portion of the world’s clothes and carries a disproportionate share of the environmental and social costs. These essays are not meant to agree with each other so much as to sit together, which they do with some productive friction.

 

Shahriar Hossain’s account of community-based water monitoring in Asulia, Bangladesh, is a case study in what happens when residents are given the tools to collect environmental data – and why the legal recognition of citizen-collected evidence matters as much as the science itself. Thivya Rakini and Oorja Engineer’s piece on Tamil Nadu’s garment factories is harder to read. Workers in Dindigul, already in a water-stressed region with falling groundwater tables, routinely suppress thirst during eleven-hour shifts because bathroom breaks threaten production targets. The health consequences – chronic reproductive illness, permanent damage, surgery – are clearly documented.

 

Lavinia Muth’s essay is perhaps the most uncomfortable for anyone working within the industry’s existing frameworks. Writing from her own experience as a sustainability manager and auditor, she describes watching a factory pass its ZDHC certification with pristine paperwork while discharging untreated wastewater at night a kilometre downstream. Her argument is not that certification is worthless but that it audits the wrong things, and that brands who refuse to pay the costs of responsible production are complicit in what follows, whatever their sustainability reports say.

 

Ani Wells’s essay on Life Cycle Assessments reveals how standard LCA methodology tends to treat cotton’s water use as a single global figure, collapsing the difference between a rain-fed field and an irrigated farm in a drought-stressed region. In so doing, it routinely makes polyester look more water-efficient. Because polyester isn’t farmed, it has no irrigation footprint and so scores well on water. What the standard methodology doesn’t capture is its dependence on fossil fuel extraction, its energy-intensive production, and the microfibres it sheds with every wash across its entire lifetime (not that naturals come off scot-free here – see this month’s longform article). Cotton’s water use is visible and therefore counted; polyester’s broader harms are not, and therefore aren’t. It is a comparison between a seasonal, living system and an industrial one, conducted as though they operate on the same terms.

 

The Drip is unlikely to resolve any of any of your questions. Instead, drip by drip are doing the work of making water visible – in the supply chain, in policy conversations, and in the lives of the people making our clothes.

 

Free to download at dripbydrip.org.

 

Worth a Visit

If you’re in London this summer, Paint! Pattern! Print! The Textiles of Susan Collier and Sarah Campbell at the Fashion and Textile Museum in Bermondsey looks well worth seeing, on until 13 September. The exhibition traces how designs move from sketchbook to cloth through one of Britain’s most influential textile design partnerships, with original artworks, fabrics and archive material on display. There are plenty of fabric painting and printing workshops too.

Diary Date

New Designers 2026 (1–4 July, London) showcases the work of more than 2500 graduating designers across textiles, fashion, materials and product design. Whether you’re looking for fresh talent or simply want to revel in the creativity of the next generation, it’s well worth a visit.