While industry-wide efforts to drive environmental legislation—positioning circularity as a solution to climate change—have accelerated in recent years, the new administration in the White House has the federal government shifting priorities with different dynamics emerging.
One of those dynamic differences considers the regulatory role that the states and private sector may be forced to play if sustainability is to stick. Suppose the less eco-focused executive and legislative branches do, in fact, place more onus on the states to drive regulation forward. In that case, they will need more capital to successfully execute at a local level.
During SJ’s Sustainability Summit, Chelsea Murtha of the American Apparel & Footwear Association (AAFA) and Rachel Kibbe of the Circular Services Group (CSG) and American Circular Textiles (ACT) discussed how local and national legislation can tackle the hurdles hindering sustainability strategies in the face of a less sympathetic federal government.
“I don’t think it’s a surprise to anyone in this room that you’re not going to get very far on Capitol Hill or with the White House right now by saying, ‘This is a great sustainability initiative,’” Murtha, the AAFA’s senior director of sustainability, said. “But that doesn’t mean there aren’t [other] things you can talk about; things they’ve indicated are very important to them: U.S. manufacturing.”
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Giving “a lot of credit” to her co-panelist—the founder and CEO of CSG and ACT—Murtha discussed the power of flipping the script to position sustainability initiatives as U.S. manufacturing and conservation efforts to gain traction.
“I’ve watched [Kibbe] in rooms with Republican legislators who are all very excited about her circularity initiative because that’s not how she’s talking about it,” she continued. “There are ways to talk about this and get through to folks who would dismiss a sustainability initiative. You can just have a manufacturing initiative that happens to have sustainability impacts [by] starting to lean on things that connect conservation to affordability.”
It’s true: Kibbe has talked about the Americas Act, for instance, taking a bipartisan lens to emphasize U.S. manufacturing—such as investing in its systems and infrastructures as well as supporting its trade partners—to ultimately underscore the environment’s business case instead of its morality clause.
“Narrative is always critical; I mean, that’s how you communicate things to each other,” Kibbe said before referencing a few “horrifying” discoveries when working on the aforementioned bill. “That made me really start to reframe the way I look at and listen to narratives—not to say that narratives can’t be dangerous; we’re seeing that play out as well, but I think that’s critical.”
While Kibbe is focused on securing the industry’s seat at the federally-funded table, Murtha is working to “galvanize” the private sector to advocate for itself—so it can be both “heard and represented as a squeaky wheel to the federal government” and to ensure the textile sector isn’t “left out of those types of opportunities,” Kibbe said.
“There’s a lot of areas where this can go wrong,” she added. “The devil is going to be in the rule writing process.”
Both panelists, however, stressed the importance of revamping existing trade policies that hinder sustainable practices as well as the value in advocating for strategic, incremental changes to achieve longer-term goals.
“There are these sort of wonky, Draconian trade policies that were established eons ago to support domestic manufacturing that haven’t been fixed or updated and are now working against us,” Kibbe said, referencing recycled cotton and the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA). “These sort of little things, like death by 1,000 cuts, are big issues that, I think, can brush us aside as an industry if we don’t coalesce and come together.”
Murtha, too, paused to remind attendees of reality.
“I don’t want to overstate, though, the ability to achieve things; it’s not as if these are magic words that will fix all the problems,” Murtha said. “But they are a good place to start when having conversations.”