Saumya Verma
Assistant Professor of Law,
Soundarya College of Law, Bangalore.
saumyaverma@soundaryainstitutions.in
Introduction
Strictly speaking, there is no legal vacuum in the environmental regulation of the fashion industry in the United States. It’s more of a fragmented regulatory environment. Federal statutes and agencies regulate textile production, chemical use, wastewater discharge, waste disposal, and environmental marketing. A handful of state legislatures have begun to experiment with fashion-specific obligations. The result is a regulatory regime in which environmental obligations certainly exist but are rarely organized around the life cycle of the industry as a whole. The distinction between lex lata (law as it exists) and lex ferenda (law in the making, or under active consideration) is a useful way of thinking about where U.S. fashion regulation is headed. Under federal law, specific environmental risks continue to be addressed through generally applicable statutes. California and New York, however, have begun to develop more targeted approaches based on extended producer responsibility, supply chain disclosure and environmental due diligence.
The Existing Framework: Lex Lata
The primary federal framework for managing solid and hazardous waste is the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), 42 U.S.C. §§ 6901 et seq. Subtitle D of the statute deals with non-hazardous solid waste, while Subtitle C deals with hazardous waste. Crucially, RCRA doesn’t require anything like a full producer responsibility scheme for apparel producers regarding routine post-consumer textiles, the law just wasn’t designed with that in mind.
The magnitude of that gap is worth dwelling on. The most recent national data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (from the calendar year 2018, the most recent year for which the agency has published comprehensive figures) indicate that textiles made up 17 million tons of municipal solid waste, or 5.8 percent of the total municipal solid waste generated that year. Of that, approximately 11.3 million tons were landfilled, and the recycling rate for all textiles was just 14.7 percent, or 2.5 million tons. The EPA continues to list these as authoritative numbers, and a subsequent review by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, GAO-25-107165, issued in December 2024, found the agency’s own 2018 data showed 66 percent of textile waste being landfilled, 19 percent combusted with energy recovery, and only 15 percent recycled. The fact that 2018 remains the reference year a decade on is telling: it shows just how far general waste regulation is from producing the kind of granular, current data a sector-specific regime would produce.
Water pollution is dealt with in a similar indirect way. The Clean Water Act is administered through the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) and is supplemented for this industry by EPA’s Textile Mills Effluent Guidelines at 40 C.F.R. Part 410. Those regulations do regulate some textile manufacturing discharges, and they are incorporated into NPDES permits, so it would be incorrect to say that textile wastewater is completely unregulated. The gap is elsewhere: in the lack of any framework that provides a holistic view of the industry’s wider chemical, resource and supply-chain footprint, rather than as disconnected discharge points.
Chemical regulation is largely via the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), 15 U.S.C. § 2601 et seq. Since its amendment in 2016, TSCA has provided EPA with significantly increased authority to evaluate and regulate risks associated with new and existing chemicals, including reporting, testing, and restrictions, as well as certification obligations for certain chemical imports. Nevertheless, TSCA is at bottom still a chemical-control statute. It is not intended to be, and does not operate as, a comprehensive law on sustainability for textiles, and its fragmented application leaves much of the environmental impact of apparel production, consumption and disposal out of its reach.
Environmental marketing is a further, separate layer of regulation. The Federal Trade Commission’s Green Guides help marketers avoid misleading environmental claims, but the Guides themselves are not independently enforceable, they are the FTC’s interpretive guidance on the application of Section 5 of the FTC Act (15 U.S.C. § 45) to environmental advertising. Real enforcement action still has to prove that the conduct at issue was unfair or deceptive under Section
That framework is important, and it has real teeth in individual cases, but it is still consumer protection law fundamentally, not a comprehensive sustainability regime.
State Innovation: The Lex Ferenda at Work
The more important movement is at the state level, and California has gone farthest. The Responsible Textile Recovery Act of 2024 (SB 707) is the most explicit departure from general environmental regulation to fashion-specific producer responsibility, creating an extended producer responsibility (EPR) framework that requires covered textile producers to join an approved producer responsibility organization (PRO).
Since then, the program has gone far beyond the proposal stage. On February 27, 2026, CalRecycle approved Landbell USA as the PRO responsible for managing textile producer obligations under SB 707, following a competitive process that included applications by the Circular Textile Alliance and the Textile Renewal Alliance. Covered producers of apparel and textile items must register with Landbell USA by July 1, 2026, and the rest of the implementation schedule takes even longer to play out: a statewide needs assessment by March 2027 and full program implementation by July 1, 2030, with implementing regulations not permitted to take effect before July 1, 2028.
That timetable has been questioned. The American Apparel & Footwear Association sued CalRecycle and Landbell USA in California state court in March 2026, asking the court to vacate the agency’s approval of Landbell USA based on the association’s assertions that Landbell USA was not formed by producers and is not a nonprofit, both of which the association contends are statutory prerequisites for PRO status. A hearing on AAFA’s motion for a preliminary injunction was scheduled for August 7, 2026, but registration obligations have remained in effect in the meantime. Whatever the outcome, the litigation serves as a useful reminder that a first-of-its-kind EPR statute is not free from ordinary scrutiny under administrative law once implementation commences.
On the merits, SB 707 is important for changing the regulatory question. It doesn’t ask what happens to textile waste, but asks who is responsible for what happens to a garment after it has been sold. The statute imports the logic of circularity directly into U.S. fashion regulation, a logic that until now had existed mostly in policy discussion, not binding law, by placing the organizational and financial burden of end-of-life management on producers.
And New York has taken a different course. The S4558B proposal is currently pending before the Senate Consumer Protection Committee and would require qualifying fashion sellers, typically those whose annual gross receipts are above $100 million, to conduct environmental due diligence and trace their supply chains. The bill would require covered companies to map multiple tiers, from sourcing of raw materials through processing and production, and address environmental risk both within their own operations and throughout their supply chains.
The bill also represents a broader convergence between environmental regulation and corporate accountability more generally. Its architecture would include greenhouse-gas reduction targets, chemical-management obligations, and supply-chain disclosure requirements, with enforcement through state authorities and civil penalties. California has developed an EPR model focused on end-of-life waste management, but New York’s approach is focused on due diligence and disclosure. A meaningfully different regulatory instrument aimed at a similar underlying problem.
Constitutional and Compliance Issues
State-specific fashion regulation inevitably invites questions of interstate commerce. This means that a business that sells nationwide may find itself having to redesign practices across its entire business because one state’s law imposes requirements on products entering that state’s market. That’s familiar Dormant Commerce Clause territory, especially when a state’s regulation has significant effects that reach far beyond its own borders.
That is not to say that a regulation that affects out-of-state activity is invalid per se. The constitutional analysis will turn on the nature of the regulation, the nexus between the regulation and a legitimate state interest, and whether the regulation discriminates against or unduly burdens interstate commerce, questions of fact and not likely to be answered categorically.
The other concern is a different, and more practical, one. Where brands rely on subcontractors, intermediaries and suppliers across multiple jurisdictions, supply-chain mapping is extremely difficult. Smaller businesses are also likely to be disproportionately affected compared with multinational competitors with existing compliance infrastructure. Thus, there is a real danger that environmental regulation could have an unintended competitive impact, with compliance infrastructure becoming just another barrier to entry.
Technology can assist at the margins, digital traceability and standardized data systems in particular, but it cannot replace legal clarity where the underlying rules are unclear. Supply-chain transparency requirements also conflict with trade secrets, confidential supplier relationships and other commercially sensitive information. In this space, legislation must strike a workable balance between information that the public truly needs for the purposes of accountability and information whose disclosure would unnecessarily compromise legitimate commercial interests.
Beyond the U.S. Borders
The fledgling American approach is in line with a broader global trend toward corporate environmental due diligence and supply chain responsibility. European developments, notably sustainability reporting obligations and corporate due-diligence requirements, indicate a shift from regulating pollution only at the point of production, to regulating the governance of environmental impact across a whole corporate value chain. This shift presents an increasingly important compliance issue for multinational fashion companies. Environmental obligations are not just defined by where a garment is made but where it is sold, by whom it is sold and what that seller is legally required to disclose.
Final Comments
U.S. environmental apparel law is moving from fragmentation toward greater regulatory integration, but has not yet produced anything resembling a unified national framework. Lex lata already includes federal statutes that address discrete pieces of the puzzle, textile waste, wastewater, chemicals, environmental advertising, each through its own dedicated framework. Their real problem isn’t a lack of regulation; it’s a failure to see the environmental footprint of the fashion industry as the connected life-cycle problem it is.
Lex ferenda is starting to occupy that space, in an uneven but visible way. The California SB 707 codifies real producer responsibility for textile waste with an approved PRO and operational implementation timeline (albeit disputed). New York’s S4558B, which is still pending, would instead mandate that the state’s largest fashion sellers conduct supply chain mapping and environmental due diligence. The two approaches differ in mechanism, but together they suggest an emerging regulatory logic: Fashion companies may increasingly be expected not merely to avoid unlawful pollution, but to demonstrate affirmative responsibility for environmental consequences written throughout their products and supply chains.
In the end, the future of U.S. fashion law might be less about one federal “Fashion Act” and more about the slow collision of waste regulation, environmental due diligence, consumer protection, and corporate transparency. It is truly uncertain whether state experimentation will eventually coalesce into a coherent national model, and litigation such as AAFA’s challenge to SB 707 indicates the path will not be smooth. What is increasingly obvious is that environmental responsibility is shifting from the edge of fashion compliance to its legal center.
References:
- Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, 42 U.S.C. §6901 et seq. (1976).
- The Textile Mills Effluent Guidelines (40 CFR Part 410) in 1974, and amended the regulation in 1977 and 1982.
- Toxic Substances Control Act. Pub. L. 116–188, title I, §108, Oct. 30, 2020.
- Clean Water Act, 33 U.S.C. §§ 1311-1314, 1342.
- The FTC Act (15 U.S.C. § 45)
- SB-707 Responsible Textile Recovery Act, 2024 (California).
- New York Senate Bill S4558B (pending, Senate Consumer Protection Committee).
- S. Government Accountability Office, Textile Waste: Federal Entities Should Collaborate on Reduction and Recycling Efforts, GAO-25-107165 (Dec. 2024).