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An examination of an overused word, Lewis’s study spans Renaissance artists, popular music behemoths and the big beasts of science as it asks why some are labelled geniuses and others are not. Read by the author.
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Notes to John
Joan Didion, 4th Estate, 6hr, 33min
Julianne Moore narrates this posthumous collection of diary entries from the late 1990s, written after Didion began seeing a psychiatrist. The entries are composed as if she were addressing her late husband John Dunne, and record her depressive episodes and fears for her daughter Quintana.
Princess Polly, available on Asos in the UK, has a lot in common with other ultra-fast fashion brands. Although a little more expensive than Boohoo and PrettyLittleThing, the Australian-American multinational offers the same kind of trend-driven, low-priced clothes, mostly made from polyester. At the time of writing, shoppers can peruse more than 2,000 dresses, from a £6 pink mini dress to an £82 cream maxidress. There are bikini bottoms for £3 and barrel-leg jeans from £8. But there is one key difference between Princess Polly and its competitors. In early July, it became B Corp certified, bringing the certification’s integrity into question.
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B Corp is the world’s most recognisable corporate responsibility certification and, since its inception in 2006, has been awarded to businesses that meet its “high standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency,” including Patagonia, the Body Shop and the Guardian. The B stands for “beneficial”.
The B Corp label has long symbolised a business dedicated to caring for people and planet. Through a rigorous, months- or even years-long verification process, it is intended to hold companies to high standards by measuring positive impact on workers, community, environment and customers. However, at the time of writing, Princess Polly is running a buy-one-get-one-60%-off promotion, pushing excess product in a way that doesn’t seem to align with B Corp values.
View image in fullscreen Cheap at half the price ... £8 barrel-leg jeans by Princess Polly. Photograph: Princess Polly
Dale McCarthy, whose carbon-neutral certified swimwear label Bondi Born was awarded B Corp status in 2020, says the news left her “deeply disappointed ... It makes a mockery of it.” “[Now] it seems any company can get certified if they issue enough policies and tick enough boxes, even if the fundamentals of the business are a major contributor to environmental damage,” she says.
Another B Corp fashion brand, New Zealand designer Kowtow, takes issue with Princess Polly’s business model, which relies on producing vast volumes of clothing. “It contributes to a hyperconsumerist culture,” says its managing director, Emma Wallace. “The root [problem] of overproduction … needs to be addressed.” A new report from the Apparel Impact Institute (pdf) attributes the apparel industry’s 7% emissions increase to ultra-fast fashion, overproduction and a reliance on virgin polyester.
On its website, Princess Polly says: “We’re on a mission to make on-trend fashion sustainable”, and notes it has introduced a range of measures, including using “lower-impact materials” such as recycled polyester and organic cotton in 30% of its “new arrivals”.
View image in fullscreen ‘Deeply disappointed’ … Bondi Born, whose founder, Dale McCarthy, is critical of Princess Polly’s certification. Photograph: Bianca de Marchi/EPA
Sustainability campaigners and industry observers voice scepticism. “It’s greenwashing,” says Alden Wicker, the founder of the Substack EcoCult, which reports on sustainability issues in the industry. “You can’t run a certification like this based on vibes. Anybody who wants a better world when it comes to how we purchase and consume fashion would have values that clash with the ethos of this brand.”
B Corp has found itself on shaky ground recently, not just because of Princess Polly. In February, after the certification of several companies not usually associated with good environmental practice, the famously ethically minded soap company Dr Bronner’s dropped the certification, stating: “Sharing the same logo and messaging … [with] companies with a history of serious ecological and labour issues, and no comprehensive or credible eco-social certification of supply chains, is unacceptable to us”.
David Bronner, the company’s CEO, is unimpressed with the certification of Princess Polly. “It’s just single-use plastic. You could be doing all kinds of good stuff, but if that’s your product offering, then that’s inherently not better for the world.”
Princess Polly says it’s “proud of its environmental, social and governance progress”, and highlights that its focus is on two areas: ethical sourcing (100% of its mostly Chinese garment manufacturers have a “valid ethical manufacturing audit”) and environmental impact (it has pledged to reduce carbon emissions by 2030). But its circularity initiatives are scant (you can read its policy here) and it only has a vague commitment to paying living wages.
In a statement provided in response to specific questions about Princess Polly’s certification, B Lab, the business behind B Corp, wrote: “B Corp certification is holistic; it doesn’t evaluate a product or service, nor is it exclusively focused on a single social or environmental issue.”
With about 10,000 companies certified, now including various well-known multinationals, B Lab says the movement is “intentionally diverse”. But to some, this broad-church approach reveals another shortcoming. “If your theory of change is engaging big and questionable players and helping them be marginally better, you need to distinguish companies that are going way beyond that,” says Bronner.
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Companies that apply for status answer more than 200 questions to measure positive impact across governance, workers, community, environment and customers, and are then given a score. The minimum score for certification is 80 points but critics point out a business can be weak in one area and make up for it in another. Businesses must reapply for certification after three, and then five, years. At least some of the contention is with using a points-based system that brands can leverage by hiring consultants able to help them navigate the application process. In other words, says McCarthy: “large companies can afford teams of lawyers and document writers”, which are resources less likely to be available to smaller businesses.
View image in fullscreen Paying attention … sustainable fashion designer and advocate Amy Powney. Photograph: Trish Ward
Change is coming. After a five-year consultation process, the certification is due to be updated next year. Under B Lab’s new standards, companies will need to meet minimum requirements across seven areas including: climate action, environmental stewardship and circularity.
Since 2024, the sustainable fashion designer and activist Amy Powney has been pursuing B Corp certification for her new label, Akyn. She says the new B Corp standards are more onerous for circularity, waste, overproduction and human rights, so “it will be interesting to see if [Princess Polly] pass in three years”.
As for the ongoing desirability of the B Corp label and its ability to signal brand value to conscious consumers, the jury remains out. Powney will still apply and at Kowtow the certification remains useful. “It has empowered our team to work on the tough stuff, ask questions of our suppliers and collaborate on solutions,” says Wallace.
For Bronner, who won’t be returning, the new standards are “directionally getting better but still failing in certain fundamental ways”. Bondi Born’s McCarthy remains sceptical: “I’ll wait and see whether B Corp as a brand continues to dilute itself until it’s meaningless – or not.”
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In February, a threadbare polycotton bedsheet landed on the desk of Simon Roberts, CEO of Sainsbury’s. A “protest by post”, it had been sent by the Sheffield-based designer, maker and eco activist Wendy Ward. “I purchased this from Sainsbury’s at least 10 years ago,” she wrote in the accompanying letter. “It has served me well. However, I have no sustainable options available for what I should do with it.” Beyond repair, it was too damaged to donate to a charity shop, she explained. She couldn’t compost it as it had been blended with polyester, and she couldn’t repurpose it as cleaning cloths, as, being polycotton, it wasn’t absorbent. And, she added, “I don’t want to put it into a textile recycling collection as the likelihood is that it will be shipped overseas or incinerated and not recycled.” Ward qualified her assertions with links to respected sources – as a sustainable fashion PhD student, she is well informed on such matters.
The vast bulk of the clothing ‘given back’ to fashion shops for recycling was destroyed, abandoned or sent overseas
“The only action I can personally take,” she continued, “is to put it into my general waste bin. I don’t want to do this, as in Sheffield all general waste is incinerated as ‘energy recovery’. This isn’t a sustainable option as such processes have been shown to be as damaging to local air pollution as burning coal.” So, she concluded, “as Sainsbury’s is responsible for designing and manufacturing this product, making decisions to use polycotton with no consideration for what could be done once it reaches the end of its life, I have decided to return it to you. I would really love to hear what you decide to do with it.”
Sainsbury’s response, sent from its executive office, was “a lame fob-off”, Ward says, and read as if it had been “cut and pasted from a complaints template”. (Sample platitude: “Sainsbury’s always welcome feedback from customers.”) But when she shared her protest with her 20,000 Instagram followers, the resounding approval – “Brilliant!” “Please upload your template” – motivated her to launch a campaign: #TakeItBack. She created an adaptable, deliberately non-combative letter (“If you’re confrontational, it won’t go anywhere,” she tells me), and encouraged her followers to return their dead clothes to brands. “It’s an empowering action,” she says. “I was wresting back a bit of control as a consumer.”
View image in fullscreen Ward at a sorting facility. The UK’s worn-out textiles are costing collectors and sorters £88m annually to process. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian
I joined Ward’s #TakeItBack campaign, sending my daughter’s ravaged school tights to Marks & Spencer’s CEO, Stuart Machin. To the UK heads of Uniqlo and H&M, I sent my kids’ damaged polyester-blend T-shirts, and to French Connection’s CEO, a greyed, misshapen T-shirt of mine that’s so timeworn, it’s transparent, all accompanied by a version of Ward’s letter. I know they’ve all been received, because I tracked them, on Ward’s advice; similarly, I washed everything first. M&S was the first to respond, reminding me about its “industry-leading sustainability programme”, Plan A, and its take-back scheme. Uniqlo sent a letter acknowledging mine, and “will respond as soon as possible”. I haven’t heard back from H&M or French Connection yet.
Ward recommends following up if they don’t answer the key questions: “What would you suggest I do with this item?” and “What are you actually doing about this problem?” She’s unsure how many people have joined her campaign, though she doesn’t expect vast numbers yet: “I know I’m preaching to the converted.”
You may be thinking: why not donate your unwanted clothes and other textiles to a charity shop? End-of-life textiles have for many years been a valuable revenue stream for charities. Rag merchants would buy them by weight and sell them on to be down-cycled into stuffing, blankets, wipes etc. But many UK charity shops are now “having to spend money getting rid of waste textiles”, says Dawn Dungate, an independent consultant who advises charities on textile recycling. Indeed, Ward’s protest was inspired by a sign in her local charity shop asking customers to dispose of “damaged, torn or worn-out items” in the bin, “as the cost of disposal is very high”.
The growing rag mountain particularly affects independent charity shops and small chains, which lack the donation volumes of bigger chains to woo textile collectors into taking their scrap (they are mainly interested in reusable items for export). “We can’t afford to upset our rag merchant,” says Emma King of Somerset-based Weston Hospicecare charity shops. “If they stop coming, our stock rooms become a health and safety nightmare, and we can’t accept more donations.” King considers herself “lucky” – they’re still getting paid for their unsold textiles: “Ten years ago, though, we’d get 65p per kilo. Now it’s just 10p.” They try to sell their scrap in-store, marketing it as upcycling projects and craft fabric. More remote shops in Cornwall and Devon are having to drive their waste clothing up the country, she says, “because it’s not financially viable for merchants to drive to them”; many shops are now forced to refuse donations.
View image in fullscreen A dumping site for secondhand clothes in Accra, Ghana. Photograph: Nipah Dennis/AFP/Getty Images
My local independent charity shop, Second Life in East Sussex, found itself in “a crisis situation”, says manager Naomi Phitidis. In December, the rag merchant stopped coming, complaining that it was receiving too much end-of-life clothing (the shop had been donating the best of its unsold textiles to local charities for homeless people, rescue animals and families in need). “Because it costs the rag man to recycle scrap, they wanted the good stuff too,” Phitidis says. “And we weren’t even getting remunerated for it – it was just to get it out of the shop.” But the team felt uncomfortable about their unsold clothing going to Ghana, and their scrap to Pakistan, a global hub for textile recycling (that’s standard practice, by the way – the environmental action charity Wrap reports that, of the 469,000 tonnes of used textiles that passed through UK sorters and graders in 2022, 425,000 tonnes were exported). So instead they reluctantly decided to have the scrap incinerated locally (at a cost), and to resume donating locally, thus avoiding “waste colonialism”. “It’s depressing,” says Phitidis. “Making the right choice is so difficult.” Second Life now asks customers not to donate stained or damaged clothing: “We wanted to say yes to it, but it’s just too much.”
The crisis is happening downstream, too. To understand why end-of-life textiles pose such a problem, we need to look at the industries dealing with them – the collectors, sorters and recyclers. The sector is facing “partial collapse”, according to a forthcoming Wrap report, seen exclusively by the Guardian. “Not everyone is going to make it through,” Wrap’s senior textiles specialist, Cristina Sabaiduc, tells me. Wrap found that the UK’s worn-out textiles are costing collectors and sorters £88m annually to collect and process – no wonder they don’t want them. Given this financial burden, Sabaiduc predicts that “textile banks in our neighbourhoods will disappear and charity shops will no longer take donations; charities will have to pay to incinerate [waste] and we’ll be putting stuff in the bin, even if we don’t want to.” The loss of revenue will be fatal for some businesses, she adds.
It’s already happening. A decade ago, there were “60 or 70 sorting and grading companies”, says Dungate. “Now only a dozen remain … This market was booming, but it’s come to a crunch point.”
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View image in fullscreen It’s a ‘really difficult, unsolvable problem’, says Ward. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian
Many believe fast fashion to be the culprit. A 2024 Wrap report explained that the “saturation of low-quality fast fashion” means that charity shops are selling fewer used clothes, and are therefore sending more to rag merchants. The low quality “results in less income for reuse and recycling sectors”, which leads to an increase in offshoring – ie it’s just not worth the bother here. Various shop managers tell me fast fashion doesn’t sell well for them because it dates quickly and doesn’t wear well over time (according to the European Commission, 50% of clothes are discarded due to pilling and colour fading). At Second Life, volunteers clear out approximately 250kg of unsold clothing every fortnight – and that’s just one small shop.
With the market flooded with unsaleable used clothing, it’s inevitable that scrap holds minimal value. What’s more, there isn’t a business case for what Ward calls “true recycling”, where unwanted textiles are recycled into new, fashion-grade fabrics (known as fibre-to-fibre recycling). According to Ross Barry of LMB Textiles, fibre-to-fibre recycling is more expensive – and much harder to do – than buying virgin polyester – “the cheapest form of plastic going”. Unsurprisingly, progress with fibre-to-fibre recycling has been minimal: “It’s not even at a drop-in-the-ocean stage yet,” says Barry (recycled-polyester clothing is mostly made from plastic bottles, not old clothes). Besides, synthetic clothes have a high calorific value, states the industry website Recycling Inside, meaning that incineration for energy recovery makes commercial sense – not least when almost 70% of all textiles contain human-made fibres.
OK, but what about the many fast-fashion take-back schemes, where you can drop off unwanted, used clothing to be reused or recycled (H&M, Primark, Zara)? Unfortunately, there’s little evidence to prove they are sustainable. A 2023 investigation by the environmental campaign group Changing Markets Foundation (CMF), entitled Take-back Trickery, found that 75% of clothing donated to fashion stores – among them, Marks & Spencer, H&M, Zara and Nike – was destroyed, abandoned in warehouses or sent overseas. Since then, says CMF’s Urska Trunk, “We’ve seen no indication that the situation has changed – take-back is textbook greenwashing.”
A 2024 report by Remake, a sustainable fashion action group, found that none of the major fashion brands evaluated were sufficiently transparent about what happens to clothing collected through take-back programmes. (Reskinned’s take-back scheme, run by LMB, could be a better model – it collaborates with 32 brands including Finisterre, Seasalt Cornwall and Sweaty Betty, and says it resells only to the global north. The rest is repurposed by designers such as ELV Denim and Ahluwalia, or recycled into insulation, stuffing, wipes, etc.)
View image in fullscreen Used clothes discarded in the Atacama desert, Chile. Photograph: Martin Bernetti/AFP/Getty Images
So you can see why conscious consumers want to take fast-fashion brands to task. Ward has also sent her partner’s jeans back to Sainsbury’s, because, she says, “the elastane has degraded, so they have saggy knees and that weird fluting, and I can’t think of a way to remedy the problem”. Eilidh Weir, a Perthshire-based artist, also sent her kids’ synthetic school trousers back to Sainsbury’s. “They were second- or third-hand, I’d already mended them, and they were looking really ratty,” she says. “I wouldn’t feel right handing them on, and I don’t want them to end up in poorer countries – or the bin.” Sainsbury’s declined to comment on these issues when contacted.
The fact remains that doing the right thing with our clothes when they die feels like a “really difficult, unsolvable problem”, says Ward. Things could be different, she believes, if the policy of extended producer responsibility (EPR) – which holds companies accountable for their products’ end-of-life impact – were enforced (Ward calls her campaign “guerilla EPR”). While there are no plans to legislate for textiles EPR in the UK, the EU is expected to implement mandatory EPR for textiles within the next couple of years. EPR is essential, says Dungate, “in order to fund the infrastructure for collecting, sorting and recycling [waste clothing]”. But, Ward adds, “many feel cynical about whether our government has the balls to do it”.
Ward hopes her #TakeItBack campaign will illuminate what she views as a “hidden problem” – she likens charity shops and rag merchants to “Wombles getting rid of stuff that we don’t have to be faced with. People think they’re doing a good thing and that their rubbish will be of some use, but I think your average person would be shocked if they were confronted with the reality.”