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Clothes piling up in your closet? A landmark California bill would mandate brands recycle them

California could become the first state to tackle the fast fashion waste overwhelming consumers and landfills

This first-in-the-nation bill, known as the Responsible Textile Recovery Act, requires producers of apparel, towels, bedding and upholstery to implement and fund a statewide reuse, repair and recycling program for their products. “We worked really hard to consult with and eventually to align all of the stakeholders in the life cycle of textiles so that at the end there was no opposition,” he said of the bill, which was passed with broad support from state legislators last month, and is now on the desk of the California governor, Gavin Newsom. But when donations are damaged or unusable, they often end up in landfills or in overseas markets in the global south, with countries like Ghana receiving as many as 15m discarded garments, known locally as “dead white man’s clothes”, each week.

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