My Lords, in moving Amendment 57, I will also speak to Amendments 58 and 59 in my name.
I feel I must begin by offering credit to the noble Earl, Lord Lytton. I was looking at the Bill and thinking, “How do we address particularly pressing issues of safety and environmental concern around products, addressing particular types of products?” The noble Earl put down an amendment on building products, and my drafting owes a great deal to his amendments, so I feel I should acknowledge that. I note that my amendments mirror each other in many ways, although noble Lords will notice that there is a difference: the clothing safety amendment suggests a three-year period before action is taken, while the single-use plastics amendment suggests two years and the period products amendment suggests one year. That is a reflection of capability, scientific understanding and the importance of having the ability to take action as quickly as possible. Viable timeframes have been carefully selected in each one.
These three amendments fit together very well because all of them address the way in which we are exceeding the planetary boundary for what are known as “novel entities”, as identified by the Stockholm Resilience Centre. These are substances made by humans and previously unknown in the natural world. Generally speaking, the natural world has no capacity to deal with, process or get rid of them. In talking about the natural world, I am also talking about the bodies of human animals—all of us. These products, chemicals, plastics and other substances are accumulating in our environment day by day, week by week, month by month and year by year. They are not going away. It is the people in the most disadvantaged communities and situations who are most exposed to these products and their increasingly understood health effects.
Amendment 57 concerns clothing safety. I suspect that there was probably puzzlement in some quarters when people saw this: “Unsafe clothing?” I have to pay credit to a new independent feature documentary by the fashion designer Jeff Garner, called “Let Them Be Naked”. I went to a London Fashion Week showing of this documentary, which focuses on the use of toxic chemicals in fabrics and the harmful impacts on human and environmental health. Clothing worn next to our skin for long periods exposes us to chemicals that can cause short-term and long-term health effects, including cancer and fertility issues. Repeated testing of clothing such as socks, school uniforms and work uniforms has found harmful quantities of toxic chemicals well above legal limits and standards. It is worth noting that, whether it is school pupils or workers with a uniform, people have no choice in these matters. Of course, this issue affects not just the people wearing this clothing but the people who make it, where the material is dumped, et cetera.
I will briefly bring in some detailed information. Laboratory research commissioned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation showed that, out of 38 samples of clothing and accessories, one in five contained high levels of harmful chemicals such as lead, PFAS—known as “forever chemicals”—and phthalates. A North American lab study of stain-resistant school uniforms identified high levels of PFAS—of course, these uniforms are worn by often very small children, so the ratio of the amount of PFAS to body weight is very high. Another chemical of concern is bisphenol A. Research for the Center for Environmental Health found that over 100 popular brands of socks contained up to 31 times California’s legal safety limit for BPA. There is a famous case of Alaska Airlines, which introduced a new uniform. Staff who were forced to wear it reported symptoms of chemical sensitivity, sore throats, coughs, shortness of breath, itchy skin, rashes and hives, itchy eyes, loss of voice and blurred vision.
I will pick up one chemical and cite some interesting British research from just this year, published in the journal Environment International. This was a real break- through piece of research. Previously, it had been said of PFAS, these forever chemicals, “Don’t worry—they don’t cross the skin barrier, so you can be wearing them, but they won’t harm you”. But this research demonstrated that that is simply not true. It is of course already known that PFAS can enter the body through being breathed in or being ingested in food or water, and it is known that, by those routes, it causes a lower immune response to vaccination, impaired liver function and decreased birth weight in babies. In this study from the University of Birmingham, 15 of 17 PFASs tested showed substantial absorption through the skin. Remember that it had been said, “No, no—this does not happen. It’s fine”. But 15 of the 17 tested were being absorbed through the skin and at least 5% of the exposure dose was being absorbed. For PFOA, which is one of the most regulated ones—it is regulated because it is considered dangerous—13.5% was absorbed through the skin. This is on people’s clothing, effectively being injected into their bodies.
There is also the important issue of plastics. It is starting to be understood—but still little understood—that, as the marine conservation organisation Plastic Soup Foundation pointed out recently, 69% of fashion is now synthetic materials. Noble Lords have heard me talking before about how microplastics are being found in human testes, placentas, breast milk and brains. But it is not just the microplastics themselves. At the Future Fabrics Expo in London earlier this year, it was pointed out that nylon in particular is very detrimental to our lungs, especially in terms of repair and growth. It is not the fibre itself that is the primary culprit but the chemicals associated with it. I was looking around this Committee and thinking that I cannot see a lot of artificial fibres, but we are a very privileged group of people; if you looked at a different socioeconomic group, that would not be the case. That is my clothing introduction.
I turn to Amendment 58, which of course is closely related because it is about single-use plastics. We mostly hope that clothing is not a single-use item, but in our environment today there is an enormous amount of
single-use plastic that is sometimes used for seconds and then will exist in our environment for hundreds of years.
Here I pay credit to City to Sea, a campaign group that I am sure many noble Lords are aware of. If noble Lords have not seen its briefing, I would be delighted to share it. Some 220 million tonnes of plastic waste were created in 2024. Globally, the average is 28 kilos per person. That is a 10% rise since 2021. Although we have been talking about plastics and having a UN plastics treaty, the amount of plastic being produced and put out into the world is still going up.
As we referred to on the previous group, so many of the products we are talking about have unnecessary single-use plastics wrapped around them. If we are to be serious about making a safe world for people to live in, we need product regulation that drastically slashes this amount of single-use plastic. In the UK alone, households throw away an estimated 90 billion pieces of plastic packaging. That is nearly 70% of our plastic waste. If we are regulating products, we need to think about the packaging as well.
Thinking again about the health impacts, a letter by the Plastic Health Council and signed by a range of doctors, including from the Alder Hey Children’s Hospital, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, Queen’s University Belfast, Doctors Against Harm, and NHS trusts, calls for action. This was in the UN context, but it also applies to the Bill. The letter recognised that endocrine-disrupting chemicals in plastics can impair sperm quality and fertility, and cause cancers, endometriosis, early puberty, neurological and learning disabilities, abnormalities in sex organs, altered growth and nervous system and immune function, and diverse respiratory, cardiovascular and metabolic diseases. I note that there has been a global decline in sperm counts of more than 60%. Leading scientists have suggested that most couples may have to use assisted reproduction by 2045.
I am aware that noble Lords may feel I am battering them over the head with a whole lot of statistics, but we are talking about people’s lives, health and future. I have talked about things that apply to us all—clothing and single-use plastics—but I turn now to the amendment in which I have suggested that we should see action from the Government within a year on period products. Here, I draw extensively on the work of the Women’s Environmental Network, which has a proposed menstrual health, dignity and sustainability Act containing elements of this and much more besides.
I will start with the biology. The vagina contains a very large number of blood vessels, which means that the skin is very absorbent. What is in period products really matters. Yet, as I learned from Helen Lynn at Wen, there are currently more regulations about what can be in a candle than what can be in a tampon. Earlier this year, lead, arsenic and cadmium were all found in a variety of tampons tested in the UK and internationally. Single-use menstrual products have been shown to contain phthalates, bisphenols and parabens, which I have already talked about in other contexts. Despite their apparently cottony appearance, tampons and pads can be up to 90% plastic, meaning they continually shed microplastics during use and afterwards.
Many of these products contain fragrances, which are of particular concern. These synthetic fragrances are compiled from a cocktail of up to 3,000 different chemicals, none of which, of course, is recorded in the packaging or—to pick up the point from the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, about transparency—available to consumers, even if they go hunting to find what they are. They contain chemicals that are carcinogens, allergens, irritants and endocrine-disrupting chemicals, which I have talked about before. Despite changes in bleaching practices to purify wood pulp, chlorine and dioxin—you really do not want to put dioxin in your body—can still be found in menstrual pads and tampons.
Finally, I come to a fast-developing and crucial issue that is a real illustration of how a lack of regulation lets us go horribly wrong. Because of environmental concerns, we have rightly seen a shift towards reusable menstrual products. Broadly, that is obviously a good thing, but there is a stigma around menstrual products and period blood. These products are often advertised as tackling menstrual odour—which is not a thing; it is an advertising construction—and contain silver or nanosilver. This applies not just to menstrual products; see also socks, T-shirts and other clothing. That causes direct toxicity to the human body and negative impacts on the vaginal microbiome—known as microbiotoxicity —which can lead to bacterial infections and even problems with pregnancies.
Of course, noble Lords have heard me talk many times before about antimicrobial resistance. The silver washes out of these reusable products and down our drains to join the cocktail of other antimicrobial-inducing products swilling around in our drains, where there are microbes that will be influenced by them and develop resistance.
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I am aware that I have given lots of facts and have perhaps battered the Committee with these issues, but they are crucial to human health and to every consumer in Britain buying any of the products I have outlined. They are crucial to the people who make these products, whether they are in Leicester or Dhaka. We wear these products some of the time; they are exposed to them every minute of their working day, and they live in communities where the residue of these products is all around people.
I am aware that the Government’s intention with the Bill is to set an overall picture, but I really hope to hear from the Minister about the Government’s intention to take action in all these areas, and to do so particularly quickly in the area of period products. These are probing amendments, but I need to hear some very positive news about action; otherwise, I may well return to them on Report. I beg to move.