Statecraft

8 October 2026 · analysis

Who Sets the Number

Two files, one decision given away

by Jacob Huibers · Lees in het Nederlands →

Two weeks lay between them. On 24 July 2026, Peter C. Leferink argued in the Dutch newspaper NRC that the Netherlands does not tackle fast fashion because a statutory definition is missing, and that without a definition there are no grounds for enforcement: no fine, no refusal of imports, no advertising ban.1 On 7 August, Liza van Lonkhuyzen and Timo Nijssen reconstructed in the same paper why extended producer responsibility for textiles — the EPR scheme in force since July 2023, which makes producers responsible for the waste phase of their own products — has not made the waste pile shrink.2 The first piece is about an instrument that does not exist. The second about an instrument that does. They describe the same event.

In both files the state has kept the word and given away the seat. The word is the law, the target, the definition: everything that can be put in a Kamerbrief, the letter with which a Dutch minister announces policy to Parliament. The seat is the place where the number is set — the number that determines who is hit, and for how much. Twice that seat has ended up outside national government, and both times this was presented as a technical preliminary question.

The decision presented as a preliminary question

The definition is the policy. Anyone who determines at what rate of turnover, at what price point and at what advertising intensity a seller falls under the scheme thereby determines its entire scope. France demonstrates this unintentionally. Its law of 8 July 2026 names two criteria, a large number of new items and a weak incentive to repair, and leaves the thresholds to a decree that had not yet appeared at the end of September.3 According to the French press, the government tested in advance that six French chains, among them Kiabi and Decathlon, fall outside the scheme, while Shein, Temu and AliExpress are named as its real target.4 The outcome was fixed before the criterion existed. It shows the definition as a distributive decision wearing a technical face.

The Netherlands has given that seat away in a different way. The advice Leferink points to — the March 2020 study by the consultancy KplusV, commissioned by the Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management (IenW) — has been followed. Open the report and you read the express finding that fast fashion is a phenomenon that is observable yet not tangible, that every type of clothing can fall under it, and that it is advisable to regard fast fashion as a manifestation of consumerism in which all actors play a part.5 No national definition has been adopted since. In 2026 the cabinet calls a definition the first step, and seeks it at European level, together with Germany and France. Without a workable definition, a national advertising ban is not being pursued.6 The Textieltafel, the Dutch round table on textiles, proposed that the Netherlands contribute to a European definition. Leferink rightly read a choice in that: contribute, not determine.1

The seat thereby moves to a European table at which the Netherlands has one voice. Between March 2020 and August 2026 the object changed materially: daily rather than seasonal introduction of new items, algorithmically personalised selling at the level of the individual screen, and a flow of parcels from outside the European Union that in 2020 was not yet a factor of any significance. The report saw part of that change coming, in a quoted forward glance at ultra-fast fashion designed on click behaviour and algorithms, in its section on game changers. The conclusion was drawn on the market as it stood before the rupture, and the word on the cover has stayed the same. Word continuity over material rupture, in six years.

The seat that stayed empty

The second file shows what happens when the state does build an instrument and leaves the same seat empty. The textile EPR imposes legally enforceable percentages for reuse and recycling on clothing brands, from fifty per cent in 2025 rising to seventy-five per cent in 2030.7 What the decree does not fix is the amount producers pay the collectors and sorters. That is left to the market. Two ministry officials, present at the first meeting of the full textile chain in January 2025, say according to the reconstruction that they are pleased all parties are at the table, and otherwise keep to the sidelines: under an EPR, it is up to the market.

What happens next is predictable the moment one reads it as a question of who holds the seat. The producer organisation that has to pay the amount commissions its own study into the costs incurred by the receiving side, according to NRC under a confidentiality contract with a penalty clause of ten thousand euros. The outcome, in November 2025: over 2024 the waste sector fell barely short, if at all — against earlier estimates of structural shortfalls, among them one by Rebel commissioned by the collectors and sorters.8 The offer to one collector dropped for 2026 from eleven cents to three cents per kilo of textile: less than a cent per garment. In June 2026 the same foundation acknowledged net shortfalls of up to fourteen cents per kilo for 2025 and 2026.9 Whoever pays for the measurement sets the number. The state wrote the obligation and let the measure of that obligation be set by the party that has to pay it.

What does get counted

The decree counts how much textile is prepared for reuse or recycled, down to fibre-to-fibre recycling. For the step that would close the loop — the use of recycled fibres in new clothing — there is only an obligation of effort: a duty to try, without a duty to deliver.7 The result is exactly what a countability trap produces. According to the reconstruction, the recyclers who can make the yarn run at a fraction of their capacity for lack of orders, while recycled yarn costs two to two and a half times as much as yarn from virgin material,10 and the bales of second-hand clothing stack up metres high because the export market has collapsed under competition from the same cheap clothing the scheme was meant to curb.

The sharpest figure in the reconstruction is a non-movement: according to NRC, waste incineration plants notice no change in the amount of textile being burned, and sorters take around fifty-three million kilos out of the collection bins year after year. Even when all three producer organisations meet their statutory fifty per cent, that says nothing about the total market, because an unknown share of textile businesses has joined none of them. Of the more than 135 textile businesses the inspectorate visited, over eighty per cent were unaware of the scheme.11 The instrument can succeed completely by its own yardstick while the reality it addresses remains unmoved. That is the definition of a congealed outcome: the output of the previous round becomes the given of the next.

Competence and structure

The attractive charge is that the cabinet does not dare. The mechanism runs deeper, and on the point where the charge seems most obvious, it is wrong. Since 1 July 2026 the European Union has levied a temporary customs duty of three euros per item on parcels under one hundred and fifty euros, which in effect ends the exemption. The handling fee of two euros per item follows from the new Union Customs Code — the customs law of the European Union, revised in Brussels — and is expected to apply from 1 November.12 There the Netherlands genuinely lacks the competence; the cabinet wrote in June that it cannot introduce the fee unilaterally ahead of time.6 The mechanism is that this real lack of competence on one instrument covers the restraint on four instruments that are entirely national: the definition, an advertising ban, the tax treatment of overproduction, education.

The hard indication that this is structural lies in the enforcement. The inspectorate that must enforce the decree, the Human Environment and Transport Inspectorate (ILT), assessed in 2022 the enforceability of the decree its own ministry was then writing. It estimated almost seventeen full-time posts if responsibility remained with individual producers, against almost six with a producer organisation, and judged enforceability without a collective to be insufficient. The ministry wrote in the explanatory note that the estimate indicates enforcement is indeed possible.7 In 2024 the inspectorate again judged the implementing regulation insufficiently enforceable.13 According to the reconstruction in NRC, enforcement was given two posts. That is two irreconcilable registers within one ministry, and no one corrects. It is dissociation in the most literal form a file can supply.

In the Strategic Triangle — Mark Moore’s model, which holds that public value, operational capacity and political legitimacy must remain in balance — the outcome is commensurate. Political legitimacy has been maximised: there is a decree, there are targets that rise year by year. Operational capacity, according to NRC, has been fixed at two posts, for a market of almost one billion garments a year.14 Public value has never been measured as a quantity in its own right, because the targets measure percentages of reuse and recycling, not the size of the waste pile. One corner maximised at the expense of the other two — and the failure mode follows from that without anyone having had to make a wrong choice.

The anchoring question

What holds when no one is looking? In the definition file: a question that has not been answered nationally since 2020 and now waits for a European table. In the EPR file: an obligation whose size is set by the paying party and whose enforcement its own inspectorate judges insufficient. In both cases the document is there and the bearer is not.

Two tests follow, and they reach beyond textiles. The first: every instrument that delegates a norm must name explicitly who sets the measure, and must vest that seat publicly. An obligation whose cost price is investigated at the payer’s commission is a negotiating position. The second: advice that is older than the material change in its own object must be defended anew before it may serve as the basis for policy. Without such a moment of review, policy keeps matching a reality that no longer exists — and it matches all the more convincingly the longer ago it was established.

The question for the Dutch House of Representatives is therefore where the seat stands on which the number is set. In one file it has gone to Brussels; in the other it has ended up with the payer.

Jacob Huibers is an interim manager with more than twenty years of experience in the Dutch public sector. He has worked as cluster manager, cluster director and kwartiermaker — brought in to stand up new organisations — at municipalities ranging from fifty thousand to over two hundred thousand inhabitants, and at inter-municipal collaborative bodies across the social and physical domains. Statecraft is his platform for strategic reflection on public-sector execution, pillar IV of House of Viridian.

Responses and counter-arguments via Statecraft.nl.

Footnotes

  1. Peter C. Leferink, ‘Het moet gedaan zijn met de trage aanpak van fast fashion’ (“The slow approach to fast fashion must end”), NRC, 24 July 2026. ↩ ↩2

  2. Liza van Lonkhuyzen and Timo Nijssen, reconstruction of extended producer responsibility for textiles, NRC, 7 August 2026. Where this piece writes “according to NRC” or “according to the reconstruction”, that article is the only source. ↩

  3. Loi n° 2026-602 du 8 juillet 2026, JORF n° 159 of 9 July 2026; the thresholds follow by décret en Conseil d’État. The draft law was notified to the European Commission under TRIS 2025/0336/FR; the Commission and Sweden issued detailed opinions. ↩

  4. French press reports of July 2026 on the testing by the Ministry of Ecological Transition (including L’Écho and Créamode); no primary government document on the testing was found. ↩

  5. Fast fashion onderzoek. Vermindering van de negatieve impact (“Fast fashion study. Reducing the negative impact”), KplusV, Arnhem, 30 March 2020, reference 1019169-019, commissioned by the Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management. ↩

  6. Answers to parliamentary questions on ultra-fast fashion, Aanhangsel Handelingen II 2025/26, no. 2388, 26 June 2026; cabinet response to the final report of the Textieltafel, Parliamentary Papers II 32 852, no. 408, 26 June 2026. ↩ ↩2

  7. Besluit uitgebreide producentenverantwoordelijkheid textiel (Decree on extended producer responsibility for textiles), Stb. 2023, 132, in force from 1 July 2023, articles 3 to 6, and the explanatory note, §6 (ILT enforceability assessment of 19 January 2022). ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  8. Stichting UPV Textiel, KPMG cost-price study, published November 2025; Rebel, study of costs and revenues at the back end of the textile chain, commissioned by the Vereniging Herwinning Textiel. ↩

  9. Stichting UPV Textiel, ‘Oplopende tekorten textielketen 2025-2026’ (“Rising shortfalls in the textile chain 2025-2026”), 17 June 2026. ↩

  10. CE Delft, additional information on textile-to-textile recycling, July 2025, commissioned by Rijkswaterstaat. ↩

  11. Human Environment and Transport Inspectorate, ‘Uitgebreide producentenverantwoordelijkheid onbekend bij bedrijven’ (“Extended producer responsibility unknown to businesses”), 27 February 2026. ↩

  12. Council of the European Union, agreement on a temporary customs duty of three euros per item from 1 July 2026, 12 December 2025; new Union Customs Code, Regulation (EU) 2026/2108, and the delegated act on the handling fee of 21 September 2026. ↩

  13. Human Environment and Transport Inspectorate, implementation assessment of the ministerial regulation on textile EPR, ILT-2024/40756, 18 September 2024. ↩

  14. Milieu Centraal: almost one billion garments a year on the Dutch market. ↩