Ep. 149: Durability at centre of circular design

This transcription has been AI generated and therefore may have some inaccuracies.

Ep. 149: Durability at centre of circular design

WTiN speaks with Mark Sumner, textiles programme lead at WRAP in the second of a two-part episode about policy and regulations driving circularity and durability in textiles. 

WTiN: Hello and welcome to WTiN's podcast, all about the regulations and legislation the textile and apparel industry needs to know. I'm Abi, WTiN's Features Editor and your podcast host. In this series we speak to the experts who are navigating and aiding navigation in this complex arena. From digital product passports and ESPR to exports and international trade, brands and manufacturers have a lot to keep on top of. So each month we speak to the experts about what the textile industry should be focusing on and the tools available to them.

Welcome back to the second part of our podcast with Mark Sumner, Textiles Programme Lead at WRAP. WRAP is the Global Environmental Action NGO. Mark carries on the conversation about global regulations influencing the textile and fashion industries transition to circularity. In this episode we speak about garment durability in this context and what we expect from our clothing. Mark touches upon the power and potential in data collection and how that has the potential to improve this durability in garments while transitioning to a circular economy.

Hi Mark welcome back to WTIN's Textile Innovation Podcast. It was great to speak to you last time about regulations and the work that WRAP has been doing. Today we're going to speak about data and durability. So with that in mind, could you please tell me what you think the biggest challenges the textile industry is currently facing when it comes to creating durable circular products?

Sumner: Nice to be back again, Abigail. And yeah, good question to get started on. Biggest challenges for durability. Well, I guess one of the things that we found during the work that we've been doing on durability, and we've got a long, potted history of working on durability here at WRAP. And in particular, in the last three, four years a really important project in collaboration with Leeds University and their LeTAC team. One of the things that we found right at the very start of that particular piece of work was how do you define durability? What does durability actually mean? And I think people are now starting to really understand that durability has a clear set of definitions.

But at the start of our work, it was quite ambiguous, and in some cases still remains ambiguous. Many people confuse quality with durability. There is the two angles to durability that we've identified, which is physical durability and emotional durability. Physical durability is how well the actual garment performs to wear and tear, through abrasions, being stretched, through washing, etc. Whereas emotional durability is what I like to talk about in terms of people falling in and out of love with their clothes and their intimate connection. Much of the work that we have been doing on durability is focused on physical durability because that really, A, aligns very closely with policy, but physical durability, there are far more opportunities for designers, product developers and brands to maximize physical durability, whereas modifying and influencing emotional durability is more complex. So, defining durability, I think, is one of the really big challenges, getting agreement about that defining durability and then how do you measure durability is also hugely complex, particularly as we talk about durability of the very diverse range of clothes that we all wear from your socks to your jeans to your top to your hats. You know, all sorts of different areas that need to be thought about. And also what's been quite challenging about developing circularity in particular focusing on durability is we always have to be reflective and aware of what's going on in policy. And the definitions of durability and the measurement of durability within policy has shifted enormously. We can see within the European framework of regulation and laws, is that in some cases, defining durability has gone in opposite directions. It'd been very difficult to get that alignment. But yeah, once we've got clarity around those, that allows us to progress really nicely with the project work that we've been doing over the past three or four years.

WTiN: That's really interesting. I've never heard about emotional durability before, but as soon as you describe that, it makes complete sense.

Sumner: Yeah, it's a really passionate area for me. I really would love to spend more time looking at emotional durability. And I'm sure everyone will have a garment in their wardrobe that they have a very strong connection with. But what's interesting about those strong connections, it doesn't always necessarily mean you wear the garment. You know, it might just sit in the wardrobe, it's almost like just a friend sitting there. Whereas there's other garments that, you know, you wear two or three times and you just don't get that connection. And then what do you do with that garment? So emotional durability is enormously powerful. But for a circularity perspective, physical durability really underpins utilisation of garments, it underpins longevity, it underpins circular business models in terms of reuse as well. So, the physical, and I guess this is why policy is focused so much on physical durability durability as well, is it's an underpinning characteristic of garments that can really drive and facilitate circular, the shift to circular business.

WTiN: Obviously, you've mentioned that regulatory push on that physical durability. And in the last episode, we spoke a lot about regulations for circularity. Is there a possibility that this could be hindering or rushing the development of circular materials and is there a gap to bridge in terms of high performance products and sustainable materials and what that means for that durability?

Sumner: I absolutely, I think that you know if we not careful, we could end up in a situation of unintended consequences around what we do around policy. Now, having said that, I'm very aware that there's a lot of work going on in Europe to avoid those unintended consequences by getting as many experts together. But we still have some of the challenges to address as we move forward. One of the things that we know that people have been talking about for a long time, when we talk about sustainable textiles, and I get asked this question all the time, and I'm sure lots of your listeners will be thinking the same thing, they'll be going, what's the most sustainable, what's the most durable material that I should be making my clothes from? And it's a good question to have, but what we've now seen in terms of data and what we've now seen in terms of evidence, this is not about what is the most suitable or durable material.

It's actually about what is the most suitable way of constructing the garment for the end use. And what we've seen, and the reason we say that is because we know that some products perform really well irrespective of what material is used in it. So we've done work looking at the performance of t-shirts, for example. And we know that you can use cotton, you can use cotton poly blends, you can use polyester elastane blends, you can use cotton elastane blends, you can use those different blends and still get a really high performance in terms of durability. At the same time though, if you do it wrong, you can end up with some product that has really poor durability. That's independent of the material that's used. It's about how the garment is actually constructed in terms of the fibres, the spinning of the yarn, the construction of the fabric, etc. So in terms of policy, it's really important that what we don't get sucked into is this is the best material. The other thing that is challenging around policy as well is trying to work out how they measure durability and what is the standard that they're working to. Now, we know again from the work that we've been doing with Leeds and the Leed Tech team is that there are some really good durable products out there. In fact, the vast majority of the textile packed members when we tested their product performed really well against the durability test that we did.

WTiN: Amazing.

Sumner: They were far better than the current policy standards. They were well above the current standards that the policy is talking about. We might be in a situation where policy sets such a low bar that actually we don't see any improvement. If we don't see any improvement in product performance or durability, it's going to make it really difficult to actually embed circularity, which then means it's going to be really difficult to get the environmental improvements that the industry needs as well.

WTiN: That is interesting. I really like what you said about there's so many different process about how the garment's made, the fibres and everything. Coming off this, the fibres and everything. And coming, so kind of coming off this, the lifecycle of textile products involves so many processes and variations between prototypes that you've touched upon, the techniques used, product locations and decisions by consumers. So to navigate this better, WRAP, I believe, has created a footprint tool. Please, could you tell me why you created this and how it works? I imagine the why you've already touched upon.

Sumner: Well, our footprint tool, again, is something that we've been working on for a very long time. And in fact, it was part of our original SCAP 2020 initiative. And the footprint tool was designed to provide a carbon on water footprint for brands and retailers in terms of their products. And within the footprint tool, it would take into account different materials that were used. It would take into account processes. It would also attribute carbon and water impacts that would be associated with different types of consumer behaviour. And in particular, things like number of washes that garment was pushed through.

And then ultimately, at the end of life, how that garment was disposed of. We also had a set of calculations that allowed us to understand how that influenced the carbon and water and also waste footprint for textiles. We've been using that tool, we've been modifying it, we've been building it, we've been finessing it to a position now, where we can work with organisations. In fact, we're working with a couple of very large international brands where we use that footprint tool to do analysis of their current approach to product development. And then we model different opportunities. So for example, if you were to substitute conventional cotton with organic cotton, or replace your polyester with recycled polyester, or use a different type of dyeing process within the manufacturing process.

We can do all the modelling that gives a relatively quick indication of the savings that could be achieved by making those changes. The durability is built into the tool in the sense that we try to model utilization. What we're looking at is trying to understand how we can maximize the utilization of a product, get as many wash wear out of that product, while it still retains its function. The footprint tool is a really good way for us to be able to model our way forward. However, what we're now trying to understand with durability specifically is there's a whole set of new modelling questions that we need to build into our approach, and particularly thinking about consumer behaviour and understanding what a consumer would think about and consider if we could demonstrate to them that the T-shirt they've just bought could be worn and washed at least 50 times. Would that encourage that customer to actually wear it 50 times or would that customer still do the same thing that they do, which might be they wear it 10 times and then decide they're going to buy a new one? So there's a whole piece of work and then some consumer behavior that we're now doing at the moment. And we're talking about displacement theory as part of that work on durability.

WTiN: I'm really excited to see what comes from that. It'll be really fascinating to learn more about consumers. Feel like we're delving into the psychology of consumers in this episode, which is really interesting. And like I said before, we could definitely do a full episode on the consumer behavior. As I imagine, you must be gathering so much data from the footprint tool. Am I right in thinking that?

Sumner: Yeah, so we're gathering a lot of data through the Footprint tool in terms of that sort of lifecycle piece. But we're also, as I said, you know, with our partners at Leeds University, we've been gathering a huge amount of data around measuring the durability of products. And, you know, we're not the only people doing this. There are other people as well, you know, other organisations looking at this as well, one or two of us. We're correlating in terms of the findings that they're developing in terms of measuring durability. I guess the important thing to also reflect when we're talking about durability, is that there is some really good durable product out there. At the same time, there are products that need to improve their durability to drive that utilization. So the next stage for us in terms of our project and durability is not just measuring the durability and understanding what that is, but then thinking about how you could take a poorly performing product and make it more durable. And that's where we start getting into, you know, the really interesting conversations about processes and materials, et cetera.

WTiN: And so this might be a bit forward thinking, but in terms of what you have already covered, the data that you have already access to, what challenge must the textile industry overcome if it is to effectively address durability? Is that something that you're able to comment on at the moment?

Sumner: Yeah, so as with all things within textiles, you know, the challenge is getting alignment on how to measure. So you compare, you can compare like for like. Now we've done an awful lot of work on this. A lot of our work aligns closely with European legislation, for example, or European frameworks. But we do push aspirationally a bit further than those policy positions. So getting measurement and getting clarity in measurement is important. It's also important that we can build into the work around measurement of durability, more and more consumer facing, or sorry, not consumer facing, but more and more consumer data so we can understand consumer behavior, both in terms of what we call modes of failure.

How does that garment fail? And what failures actually lead a customer to dispose of their garment and stop wearing it. Now we know for some categories of products, very clear modes of failure. So if we think about products such as denim, denim tends to be disposed of when the fabric has worn through to a hole, particularly if that hole is around the sort of inner thigh area. When we have failures like that, we know that that leads to disposal. For t-shirts, for example, t-shirts that have spirality, where the seam twists a lot. You may recognise this on some of your t-shirts, that after washing a few times, the seams, rather than sitting along the side of your rib cage, it tends to rotate. So sometimes you almost have a seam coming across the front of your body and that changes the way that the garment fits and we know that that is a reason for why people throw their clothes away. So what we need is more of that data so we can make sure that the assessment that we're doing is the right time of assessment. We also need, we believe very strongly that it's no good measuring the durability and improving the durability of product without telling the customer about it. What we're looking at now is how we can start to engage with organizations to create customer-facing standards that allow customers to be able to say, and make a choice about, I want to buy that product because that has been independently tested and it's more likely to be durable than this product over here.

That's important because one of the key things that we found, and we've talked about this a lot within the project and across the industry is price does not give you an indication of durability of product. More expensive products are not guaranteed to be longer lasting and cheaper products are not necessarily poor quality in terms of durability. And in fact, when we looked at the analysis, there is no correlation between price and durability. And just so we technically we get that right, no correlation, it means that you cannot determine by just looking at price, whether that product is good or bad in terms of durability. As a customer, if you can't use price, how else can you identify the durability performance of a product? The only way is to have a customer-facing standard. So those are some of the challenges that we think the industry needs to sort of resolve to be able to really accelerate not just measurement and improvement of durability, but engagement with customers so they actually buy durable product.

WTiN: And just kind of coming off that, how do you think reliable independent data like you are collecting at WRAP, how could that impact policy within the EU and further afield and is there currently a lack of that reliable independent data available at the moment?

Sumner: There are very few organisations that we're aware of that have done the level of analysis and testing that has been done through the Textiles Pack project with Leeds. We do know that there are other organisations like Derabi, for example, Derabi Project in Europe have done an enormous amount of testing as well. Outside of that, there is some academic publications, but the scale of that research and the alignment with policy in terms of how they've done the research is limited. So there is, I would argue, a vacuum, a data vacuum gap, where there isn't enough data to be able to provide the policy makers with a clear insight and understanding of how policy can be developed, and in particular, how aspirational that policy can be. And one of the critical areas in terms of data is the recognition that durability and the way that you assess durability varies from product category to product category. So I've already mentioned that the durability of denim and the modes of failure are different to t-shirts, but we have broad categories of product where the function of failure are different to T-shirts, but we have broad categories of product where the function of that product and how that product reacts to wear and tear and washing and what the modes of failures are, they're so different that you can't have one standard approach for durability or one standard measurement or categories. It just doesn't make sense. Now, we know that policy areas are sort of trying to get their head around categories and also trying to get their head around, you know, that data gap. But those are the two big ones for us in terms of really understanding how policy can improve the utilization of product in the long run.

WTiN: In our last episode, we spoke about WRAP's roadmap for the transition to circularity and we also looked at your systems transformation. How could the creation of reliable data further enhance what WRAP has already set out within the roadmap and how can it, well I think you've already described a lot, but how can that really impact the industry moving forward?

Sumner: Well the durability where I've just been talking about that fits sits right in the middle of our circular design component for the roadmap. So durability along with recyclability, recycle content, design for repair, all sits under that umbrella. Data is critical for the development of all of those areas of circular design. For example, in terms of recycle content, we're creating data and working with signatories to really understand how much recycled content could go into a product without affecting its function, its performance, and that's going to be based on data. In terms of durability, one of the things I think is really interesting about the work that we've been doing around testing products, it's human nature, isn't it, that you would feel slightly concerned that you are going to be tested or your product is going to be tested. Will it pass? Will it fail? We don't know. And that was a very natural response for many of our signatories that took part in the durability work. But what was really interesting is a lot of the textile pack signatories, the durability of their product was really good. So getting data out there so that people understand that actually, what you might find, or you're more likely to find, particularly if you're a Textiles pack member, you're more likely to find that a lot of your product performs really well to the standards that are being created at the moment. And I think that provides a level of confidence for people to go, well, we'll do a bit more of this. We'll put more garments into this. We'll take the best practice from the product development of that particular product and apply that to other products within our range. So there are different levels in terms of how the data can be used. It can be used at policy level, but it can also be used within businesses and within buying teams, but we need to get the data first.

WTiN: Yeah, it's gonna be really interesting to see how that data is going to shape the industry as you move forward. Because obviously, the more data we get, the more reliable systems can be built. So just thinking about round enough episode, I'm right thinking that WRAP will be at industry events in the second half of the year. What conversations are you hoping to have and what conversation you hope will be shaping these events and is durability something that you would like to focus on?

Sumner: Yeah, we, as always, we're always engaging with other stakeholders through events and conferences. You know, I think I said in the last podcast, we don't have all the answers. So we need to be learning from others about how we can bolt our knowledge and expertise into that sort of bigger system piece. But the conversations that we really want to have around circular design is to demonstrate the circular design that there are huge opportunities for developing product that is more durable, is recyclable, has more recycled content. And for some of these changes in product development, there isn't necessarily a major change in how supply chains are set up and a major change in how people think about the cost price of that product. So we want to have those conversations with organisations to start to really explore how circular design can be actually really embedded into business and how that circular design can then be used to drive other business opportunities around resale, for example, and reuse. So we're having lots of conversations with innovators at the moment to really see how a brand the connection with their consumers by having durable products that can go through different lifecycle approaches, and be in different sales modes. So it gets reused and resolved in different ways. So those are important conversations that we want to have. We also really want to engage with policy to share the data, to share the experience. Fundamentally, for circular design and in particular around durability, we really want to be talking to organisations that are feeling bold, who might be feeling like they want to go out and demonstrate leadership around durability to see how we can develop customer-facing messages to help customers identify where really good, durable, fashionable product exists, and when they purchase that product, how they can get real value from that product. Even if they decide that they're going to fall out of love with that garment, because it's durable, it has greater resale value. So we want to have those sort of conversations to really expand the detail of physical durability and demonstrate how it can underpin a whole range of different activities that brands and businesses can have.

WTiN: That's amazing, thanks Mark. And then my final question is, moving forward, please can you tell me what advances WRAP would like to have made by the end of the year?

Sumner: Oh wow, that is a good question. We're very proud of the work that we've been doing as part of the Textiles Pact, but it's only part of what we do. And we're going to be working really hard internationally to show to others, you know, some of the really good advances that we've been making. So I'm hoping that one of the areas that we can really motor on is link up with organizations that may not know who we are, so they learn about who we are, what we do, and we can demonstrate our value to them.

WTiN: Amazing. Well, thank you so much for joining me on Textile Innovation Podcast. It's been fantastic speaking with you. Thank you very much for the opportunity. Thank you so much for joining me on Textile Innovation Podcast. It's been fantastic speaking with you.

Sumner: Thank you very much for the opportunity.

WTiN: Thank you so much for listening. If you have any questions or want to learn more, you can follow us on LinkedIn at World Textile Information Network, or you can contact me directly at content at WTiN.com. If you are interested in sponsoring an episode of the podcast, please email sales or you can contact me directly at content at WTiN.com. If you are interested in sponsoring an episode of the podcast, please email sales at wtan.com. Thank you and we'll see you next time.