The government already published the case you are being asked to justify

Services Australia rolled out new corporate uniforms in August 2022, which created the question that usually gets postponed: what happens to the old ones, when the old ones are branded and have to be destroyed securely.

The scale is the part worth quoting in an internal business case: the department's published case records «over 80,000 uniforms estimated to have been issued over the preceding 10 years», with staff «located across Australia, including regional and remote areas».

They ran market research, consulted experts and went to market through a limited tender. The supplier had to demonstrate the environmental and social benefits of its process, and the outputs were «reusable across several consumer and manufacturing markets».

A branded uniform is not ordinary textile waste. It identifies an officer, it opens doors, and a bag of them behind a depot is an impersonation risk before it is an environmental one. That is why uniform disposal so often ends in destruction: destruction is the only outcome most organisations know how to evidence.

The case is useful precisely because it did not accept that trade-off. Security and recovery were both requirements of the same tender.

The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority approached the other end of the same problem — buying rather than disposing. Its case notes that different environmental considerations were applied «according to the characteristics required for each garment».

That distinction matters and is usually collapsed: a high-visibility safety garment and an office shirt do not have the same recovery options, and a policy that treats them as one category will either over-promise on the safety item or under-ask on the shirt.

A precedent exists and it is a government one: both cases sit on the department's sustainable procurement Success stories index.

Ask for the destination, not the destruction. Split the garment types before writing the specification. And put the evidence obligation in the tender, not in a report afterwards — the supplier there had to demonstrate the benefits, and that requirement is what produced a citable number.