Looking beyond the current 'take, make, waste' fashion model

Circularity is the big buzz word. It simply means moving away from the ‘make, take, waste’ model that has become the norm for a world that’s become used to excess stuff at excessively cheap prices, and instead, going back to a system that treats our resources – whether cotton, polyester, wool or leather – as the precious raw materials they are. Make-do and mend was our grandparents’ mantra during the war years, and we need to rethink what we’re doing now: repair, reuse, recycle is the way both consumers and brands need to think about our clothing going forward.

Taking responsibility for fashion’s huge waste problem

According to Mary Creagh, former chair of the UK Environmental Audit Committee which published its report Fixing Fashion: clothing consumption and sustainability in February 2019 in the UK, we get rid of over a million tonnes of clothes, with £140m worth going to landfill, every year. “Fashion retailers must take responsibility for the clothes they produce. That means asking producers to consider and pay for the end of life process for their products through a new Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) scheme. The Government must act to end the era of throwaway fashion by incentivising companies that offer sustainable designs and repair services. Children should be taught the joy of making and mending clothes in school as an antidote to anxiety and the mental health crisis in teenagers. Consumers must play their part by buying less, mending, renting and sharing more.”

What’s it going to take to eradicate clothing and textile waste?

The industry needs to embrace a system that is circular, (where there is not an “end of life”, just “end of use”), rather than linear, (where a product reaches the end of its use and is simply thrown away, clogging up our landfills for years and years). There are many ways we can incorporate circularity into the system. Clothing rental is one of the most obvious ways to reduce waste and slow down our consumption levels, whilst still enabling people to indulge their need for novelty and self-expression. Subscription-based services which ‘Spotify’ our wardrobes are a huge growth area. The global rental sector is seen by many as a massive business opportunity too – estimated to grow by 10% by 2023 to US$1.9 billion

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Clothing rental

According to McKinsey’s State of Fashion report, a key driver for the rental business will be young people wanting to satisfy their craving for newness while also ensuring they are taking steps to minimise their carbon footprint by buying new clothes made from virgin materials. “Young people today crave newness, and these cohorts are much more likely to embrace churn in their wardrobes,” it asserts in the report under the heading ‘End of Ownership.’ “At the same time younger generations are more interested in sustainable clothing than older consumers. Rental, resale and refurbishment models lengthen the product lifecycle while offering the newness consumers desire.”

Clothing re-sale

There is also a huge growth projected for the fashion resale industry with platforms like Depop, Vestiaire Collective, and The RealReal. According to American platform ThredUp, the second-hand clothing market is set to grow from US$24bn currently to US$51bn by 2023 . That’s a lot of clothes being revalued, recirculated and re-loved by a new generation of Gen Z (18-24 year olds) and millennial shoppers who are forgetting that the high street even exists because they are locked into a new way of buying – and re-selling – their clothes. It was predicted that in 2019, 1 in 3 Gen Zers will shop second hand according to ThredUP’s report, with the second-hand market growing faster than the traditional retail market (3% as opposed to 16% between 2018 - 2023).

Increasingly, rental and resale platforms are using sustainability as a marketing tool in promoting their services. Vestiaire Collective has set itself the task of educating its customers about circularity. They conducted a survey in 10 of their key markets and while 77% of their customers in Europe, America and Asia said sustainability is important, less than a third of them recognised or understood the term ‘circular fashion.’ They produced a booklet, Buy, Sell, Share, Care: The Ultimate Consumer Guide to Circular Fashion

Designing products so they never become waste

But a circular economy that keeps garments in circulation longer is not enough. Circularity must apply to the way products are made, and how textiles should be produced so that there is a closed-loop enabling a textile to be disassembled and recycled once a product is worn out. Currently, only 1 % of clothing is recycled into new clothing . The Austrian textile manufacturer Lenzing has developed a closed-loop system for its Refibra Tencel fabric using pre-consumer cotton scraps and wood pulp (from certified sustainable sources) to create a textile that can be recycled. Eventually, the goal is to be able to use post-consumer waste – our worn-out cotton T-shirts and underwear for example – to feed into the system too

Recycling textiles

More investment is needed to find ways to recycle our textiles but ultimately circularity must be designed into the system from the outset. G-Star’s Cradle to Cradle Gold certified denim jeans, launched in 2018, are made using a technique that is open-sourced through the Cradle to Cradle Products Institute’s Fashion Positive Materials Library . Cradle to Cradle is a system that eliminates waste from the manufacturing process creating a circular system. The rivets are designed to be easily removed so the garment can be more easily recycled. Other brands are producing products designed with recycling in mind. Other innovations in this field include the Berlin-based start-up Circular.Fashion who won the 2019 Global Change Award for their Circular Design Software solution designed to enable designers to build circularity into their entire value chain from sketchbook to eventual re-use and ultimate recycling.

The estimated cost to the UK economy alone of landfilling clothing and household textiles each year is approximately £82 million . We need to harness those funds to invest in finding new solutions to keep the materials already in existence in the system for longer. The re-engineering of waste, whether the fabrics left on the cutting room floor or the deadstock and unsold inventory brands are left with at the end of each season, is a new industry, and a business opportunity, in itself.