Towards sustainable growth in the textile industry: a case study of environmental policy in China

As an energy- and carbon-intensive sector, the textile industry has been the subject of many environmental policies. It has been under rigid regulation to promote energy conservation and emissions reduction in China, and a few scholars have carried out longitudinal and comprehensive studies of environmental policies aimed at the industry. This paper tries to fill in this gap by systematically analyzing the major environmental policies in this industry in China – the world’s largest exporter of textile products. For the purpose of ensuring the accuracy and reliability of this research, 118 textile environmental policies from 1989 to 2016 at the central government level have been studied by employing content analysis, including command and control instruments, market-based instruments, and voluntary instruments. The following conclusions were derived: 1) The textile environmental policy system is stabilizing in China, and water pollution is the key treatment objective. 2) Most policies regulate textile manufacturing, but environmental issues are not effectively regulated at the consumer stage. 3) The imbalanced structure of policy instruments reflects the government serving as the main driver of textile environmental protection, and efficiency and flexibility need to be improved to form an integrated textile environmental policy system.