Introduction
You may have seen Ontario’s Bill 90 described as a modest “governance bill” — something that simply opens a conversation about textile waste while keeping all options on the table.
That’s not what it does.
Bill 90, formally the Textile Waste Act, 2025, is a piece of private member’s legislation that quietly locks in a major policy outcome for Ontario’s fashion industry before any review even begins: Extended Producer Responsibility, or EPR. This post breaks down what the bill actually says, who ends up paying for it, and why the gap between how it’s been described and what it requires matters enormously for small Canadian fashion producers.
Key takeaways
- Bill 90 doesn’t ask whether EPR is the right approach to textile waste. It only asks how to roll it out.
- The bill’s reporting structure treats anything short of EPR designation as an outcome requiring ongoing justification — every two months, with no end date.
- The small Ontario producers who would carry the heaviest compliance burden aren’t specifically named in the consultation list.
- Offshore fast fashion platforms — the ones driving the largest share of disposable textile waste — sit entirely outside the bill’s reach.
- Ontario has no commercial-scale fiber recycling infrastructure. Without it, EPR creates a new administrative layer without changing what actually happens to textile waste.
What is Bill 90?
Bill 90 — the Textile Waste Act, 2025 — was introduced as a private member’s bill by Ontario MPP Mary-Margaret McMahon. As of April 2026, it has passed First Reading and been ordered for Second Reading. It is not yet law, but it is moving.
The bill amends the Resource Recovery and Circular Economy Act, 2016 (RRCEA) by adding a new section — s.75.1 — directing Ontario’s Minister of Environment to review how textiles should be designated as a regulated material under EPR.
That framing is doing a lot of work. Here’s why.
Read the actual bill language
Section 75.1(1) tells the Minister to:
“…commence a review to determine the manner in which to include textiles as a designated class of material.”
Not whether. How.
Whether EPR is actually the right tool for textile waste in Ontario — whether the infrastructure exists, whether it targets the right actors, whether it would reduce waste at all — none of that is part of the review. The bill assumes the answer and moves directly to implementation. Supporters describing this as an open process are either misreading the legislation or choosing not to engage with that specific word: manner.
The reporting structure that removes any off-ramp
This is the part of the bill that rarely gets discussed, and it’s arguably more consequential than the designation question itself.
Sections 75.1(5) through 75.1(7) lay out what follows the review:
- Within 6 months, the Minister must report findings to the Legislative Assembly, including a timeline for designating textiles.
- If textiles haven’t been designated once that report is delivered, the Minister must explain why — and keep explaining, every 2 months, until designation happens.
There’s no provision allowing the Minister to conclude EPR is the wrong instrument. There’s no pathway to recommend a different approach. Delay isn’t treated as a legitimate policy outcome — it’s treated as a failure requiring indefinite public justification. The review has one acceptable result built into its design.
⚠️ What designation triggers automatically
Once textiles are formally designated under the RRCEA, the existing compliance framework applies — no additional legislation required. Ontario producers would face:
- Mandatory registration with the Resource Productivity and Recovery Authority (RPRA)
- Enforceable recycling targets
- Third-party auditing
- Annual reporting
- Penalties of up to $1 million under O.Reg. 558/22
These requirements were built for large industrial producers with compliance infrastructure. Bill 90 contains no instruction to scale them based on the size of a business.
Who actually pays — and who doesn’t
Supporters of the bill argue EPR will finally hold fast fashion accountable. It’s worth looking at how the bill’s liability structure actually works.
Bill 90’s liability waterfall (s.75.1(4)) assigns responsibility based on Canadian residency — first to the brand holder, then the importer, then the retailer, but only where each is resident in Canada. Large importers like H&M and Zara, who have Canadian stores and distribution operations, are reachable under that structure. They also have legal teams, compliance departments, and the margin to absorb or pass on the costs.
Ontario’s small domestic producers — 356 clothing manufacturers, 98% of which employ fewer than 100 people — don’t have any of that. And platforms like Shein and Temu, which ship direct from overseas warehouses parcel-by-parcel to Canadian consumers with no Canadian commercial presence, fall entirely outside the bill’s reach. They generate the largest and fastest-growing share of disposable textile waste in this country. Under Bill 90, they owe nothing.
COMPARISON TABLE — Who bears the burden?
| Small Ontario Producer | Offshore DTC (e.g., Shein, Temu) | |
|---|---|---|
| RPRA registration | Required | Exempt |
| Recycling targets | Enforced | Exempt |
| Third-party audit | Required | Exempt |
| Annual reporting | Required | Exempt |
| Penalty exposure | Up to $1M | Exempt |
| Practical cost burden | Material threat to viability | None |
The offshore gap isn’t a design flaw — it’s a structural limit of domestic EPR
Reaching platforms like Shein and Temu requires trade-level tools: import duties, de minimis threshold reform, customs classification changes. Those aren’t things a provincial EPR framework can do. Bill 90’s review mandate doesn’t require the Minister to consider any of them.
The outcome of that gap is a near-perfect inversion of accountability. A Toronto designer making small-batch, locally sourced clothing — the kind of producer that almost never shows up in textile waste audits — would face mandatory RPRA registration, enforceable targets, third-party audits, annual reporting, and potential seven-figure penalties. A platform shipping billions of cheap garments into Canada and driving the disposable clothing culture that actually fills landfills faces no obligation at all.
That’s not an accident of drafting. It’s what happens when domestic EPR legislation is applied to a problem that is substantially offshore in origin.
The industry absorbing this cost has already been through a lot
Canada’s domestic fashion manufacturing sector has spent three decades on the wrong side of trade liberalization. The market more than tripled in real terms between 1992 and 2022 — 257% growth in inflation-adjusted retail apparel sales. Domestic manufacturers’ share of that market collapsed over the same period. Import penetration hit 94.6% by 2020. There are now 356 clothing manufacturers left in Ontario, down from a sector that once supplied most of what Canadians wore
Bill 90 would add new compliance obligations to the businesses that survived that process, while the offshore platforms that accelerated their decline continue to operate without consequence.
The numbers for a small Ontario producer under a comparable EPR framework:
$5,500–$13,500 CAD — estimated upfront compliance cost
$6,375–$13,500 CAD — estimated annual ongoing cost
120–230 hours — annual administrative time, equivalent to 3–4 additional working weeks per year
The consultation list and the small producer problem
Section 75.1(3) of the bill specifies who must be consulted during the review:
- companies that manufacture, distribute, or import clothing or household textiles
- organizations that collect, sort, or process textile waste
- NGOs working on waste reduction and circularity
- municipalities
- the RPRA
Some will look at that first item and argue small designers are covered. On paper, they’re not wrong. But Ontario has been here before. When the province transitioned packaging to full EPR under the same RRCEA framework, the consultation was dominated by large CPG companies and national trade bodies. Small producers learned what the obligations meant for them after the framework was already designed. The bill makes no structural accommodation to prevent that from happening again — it lists a category, it doesn’t guarantee a voice.
That asymmetry isn’t incidental. The organizations with the resources to show up and shape this consultation are frequently the same ones that would benefit from a compliance framework that raises costs for smaller competitors. It’s worth being clear about what that means: the consultation list, as written, gives the most influential seat at the table to the parties with the least incentive to protect small producers.
Ontario has a real waste problem. EPR might make it worse.
Toronto’s Green Lane Landfill is projected to reach capacity by 2034 or 2035. Ontario-wide landfill capacity is estimated to run out by 2034. This is a genuine crisis and it deserves a serious response.
Textile waste, though, makes up somewhere between 1.3% and 2.6% of Canadian landfill waste depending on the study — and audits consistently show that local producers are not the source. Fast and ultra-fast fashion is. Targeting small Ontario manufacturers through EPR doesn’t move that number.
There’s a less-discussed problem worth naming: EPR fees in comparable programs are typically calculated on a per-kilogram basis. That means the fee on a cheap, disposable garment is lower than the fee on a durable, well-made one — even though the cheap garment is far more likely to be landfilled within months. A poorly structured EPR system doesn’t penalize disposability. It can actually reward it, creating a financial incentive to make clothing cheaper, lighter, and shorter-lived. Bill 90’s review mandate contains no instruction to address this.
⚠️ The recycling infrastructure that doesn’t exist yet
EPR is built on the assumption that there’s somewhere for collected textiles to go. In Ontario, there mostly isn’t — not at commercial scale.
Four infrastructure stages are needed before EPR can produce genuinely circular outcomes:
- Collection — drop-off points exist but coverage is inconsistent, particularly in rural and remote areas
- Storage and logistics — depot capacity is already strained in parts of the province
- Sorting — no scalable technology currently handles the range of fiber types, blends, dyes, and chemical finishes in real-world textile volumes
- Fiber recycling — chemical recycling that can actually return textiles to new textile fiber does not exist in Canada at commercial scale
Without stages two through four, EPR doesn’t create a circular system. It inserts a Producer Responsibility Organization between the same collection and landfill endpoints that exist today. The compliance costs change. What happens to the clothing doesn’t.
What 18 years of textile EPR in France actually shows
France passed textile EPR legislation in 2007 — the first country in the world to do so. Refashion (formerly Eco-TLC) was created in 2008 to administer it. Nearly two decades of data make France the most useful comparison for what Ontario could actually expect.
The results are not what EPR advocates tend to highlight:
- Fiber-to-fiber recycling remains negligible. Across Europe as a whole, less than 1% of post-consumer textile waste is recycled back into new textile fiber — and France, running the most mature EPR program on the continent, hasn’t shifted that figure (BCG & ReHubs, 2026).
- In 2024, roughly one-third of textiles placed on the French market were recovered through EPR systems. The collection rate has stayed roughly flat while volumes placed on the market keep climbing — so the absolute gap in unrecovered tonnes grows every year (Refashion, 2025).
- EPR fees grew from €25.5 million in 2019 to €139 million in 2024 — more than fivefold in five years. The system is still structurally under-resourced (Eco-TLC, 2020; Refashion, 2025).
- In July 2025, France’s largest textile collection operator, Le Relais, halted all collection and dumped unsorted clothing outside major retailers to protest chronic underfunding. The French government was forced to commit €49 million in emergency support (Bhatia et al., 2025; Modaes Global, 2025).
- Despite 18 years of textile EPR, France is Shein’s fifth largest consumer market globally (FRANCE 24, 2026).
EPR redistributed who pays for textile waste in France. It did not reduce textile waste in France.
“Even the most well-designed textile EPR regulation cannot fix the most significant contributors to the problem of textile waste: the overproduction and overconsumption of textile goods.” ~(Kennedy, 2024).
Deborah King
Deborah is a sustainable fashion expert located in Toronto, Canada. She’s an Industrial Engineer with a post-grad in Sustainable Fashion Production, and is currently pursuing a Master in Environmental Studies. She grew up on the tiny island of Tortola in the British Virgin Islands, and has been sewing her own clothing since the age of 10. She founded Global Measure to help authentically sustainable and ethical fashion businesses stand out from the greenwashing noise through third-party certification.
References:
Association of Municipalities of Ontario. (2023). Waste management in Ontario: Capacity, challenges, and the path forward. https://www.amo.on.ca/sites/default/files/assets/DOCUMENTS/Waste/2023/AMO-ON-Baseline-2023-v6-AODA.pdf
Bhatia, K., Austruy, E., Giraud, T., Manuelli, N., Wong, R., & Bégué, M. (2025). Textile waste at a tipping point: Unlocking Europe’s circular potential. Boston Consulting Group. https://web-assets.bcg.com/6f/b8/b262fc9d475d8e77d8702f248824/bcg-publication-textile-waste-vf.pdf
Boston Consulting Group & ReHubs. (2026). Advancing textile circularity — Europe’s textile waste challenge: Scaling textile-to-textile requires enabling mechanisms. https://www.bcg.com/publications/2026/advancing-textile-circularity
CBC News. (2025, September 19). Toronto’s main landfill could be full in just 10 years. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/toronto-green-lane-landfill-1.7638936
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Eco-TLC. (2020, June 16). Feedback on the French mandatory EPR system for clothing and footwear [Conference presentation]. EPR Club Webinar. https://www.acrplus.org/media/origin/images/Webinars/2020_06_16_EPR-for-textiles/EcoTLC_EPR-Club_2020-06-16.pdf
FRANCE 24 English. (2026, February 3). Inside the Chinese factories of fast-fashion giant Shein [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYLbCitY_0k
Kennedy, C. (2024). What goes around should come around: Extended producer responsibility for textiles. Environmental Law Reporter, 54(5), 10376.
King, D. (2025). EPR’s impacts on small and medium Canadian fashion businesses. Global Measure Inc. https://globalmeasure.org/epr-6/
King, D. (2026). The changing structure of Canada’s apparel industry [Final report, ENVS 6182, Environmental Analytics]. Global Measure Inc.
Modaes Global. (2025, July 21). France infuses $49 million to stabilize textile recycling infrastructure. https://www.modaes.com/global/companies/france-bails-out-its-textile-recycling-network-with-49-million-to-prevent-system-collapse
Ontario Regulation 558/22: Registrants — Responsibilities of Producers, Resource Recovery and Circular Economy Act, 2016, S.O. 2016, c. 12, Sched. 1. https://www.ontario.ca/laws/regulation/220558
Refashion. (2025). Key performance indicators of the clothing, household linen, and footwear industry. https://rapport-activite.refashion.fr/static/eng-kpi-s-2024-3.pdf
Statistics Canada. (2024). Canadian business counts, with employees, June 2024 (Table 33-10-0761-01). https://doi.org/10.25318/3310076101-eng
Textile Waste Act, 2025, Bill 90, 1st Session, 44th Parliament, Ontario. https://www.ola.org/en/legislative-business/bills/parliament-44/session-1/bill-90
