EPP Group is ensuring that Europeans waste fewer clothes in the future and it is a top priority for them. This the biggest political group in the European Parliament and comprises of 177 Members from all EU Member States. It also insisted on making clothes more durable.

Ahead of the vote on the plans in plenary later, Pernille Weiss MEP, the EPP Group’s lead negotiator on a new European Textile Strategy, said that “We produce too many cheap and non-durable clothes. We want to change that. The European textile sector must become the leading sustainable sector in the world.”

Weiss further added that “Every citizen in the EU produces 12 kilograms of waste per year because of textiles. On average, we only wear our textile pieces 7 or 8 times before we send them to the waste stream. The textile sector in total emits more CO2 emissions than the car industry. There is an extremely high potential to do better in the sector and reduce its carbon footprint.”

The textile strategy is a central piece of the European Commission’s Circular Economy Action Plan. Textiles are the fourth-largest category of pollutants after food, housing and transport. It is estimated that less than 1 percent of all textiles worldwide are recycled into new textiles.