Planet
92 tonnes, that is how much waste of garments finish by polluting landfills every year, out of the 100 tonnes produced. (Earth.org, August 2023) This explains rightfully why the Fashion Business School at the London College of Fashion has made it its goal to categorise the Fashion Industry into four significant and strategic pillars: People, Profit, Purpose and Planet. Not in any particular order, the pillar of the Planet is not the easiest one to tackle, as it raises a number of issues that need to be addressed in order to attain a new ecosystem that drives a more sustainable business.
The circular economy is almost like a replica of the natural ecosystem that exists on earth but integrated into our daily business plans or as the Ellen MacArthur Foundation puts it “a systemic shift that builds long-term resilience, generates business and economic opportunities, and provides environmental and societal benefits” (2017). This, in turn means that no item of clothing has one single life, but multiple lives and that the idea is to rethink our practices, refuse unsustainable materials, reduce our consumption, reuse our materials, repurpose our clothes, repair what is broken, return the unwanted item and recycle if it can’t be reused, repurposed, repaired or returned.
Undoubtedly, the original 3R’s reduce, reuse and recycle are practices that hopefully most people have integrated in their day-to-day lives, but they are not enough anymore to call our economy a circular one. That is why the 8R’s are more reflective of how far we must consider a garment before recycling it nowadays. This concept goes hand in hand with one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals invented by the United Nations in 2015 in order to repair our world from the 17 most pressing issues by 2030. The specific goal which correlates with the fashion industry is the 12th one titled “responsible production & consumption”. Thus, both the brand and the consumer have a role in this pursuit to prosperity, as the brand is here to make conscious decisions about the materials used and the carbon imprint that the garments will have consumed during each process of the supply chain and the consumer will have to think about the longevity of the item.