Making Fashion-As-A-Service Green
Rental fashion, or fashion-as-a-service, has always been seen as a sustainable approach. You only get the clothes you need for a time and return them once you are done. It certainly frees up your closet and stops you from hoarding. However, this may not be as sustainable as you think, due to its hidden charges that are not-so sustainable. Christine Yeager presents the most practical way to make fashion-as-a-service as green as possible by finding that sweet spot between buying and renting clothes.
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Making Fashion-As-A-Service Green
Welcome back to Change Cycle, the show where we confront the discomfort that comes with change. In this episode, we're going to unpack whether or not fashion as a service is saving the planet. Rental fashion options have always made sense or always been marketed as a climate saving option. There's also been a criticism that you should just buy for the long term. Where is that sweet spot? That's what I want to unpack.
What is interesting about this idea in the fashion space is that fashion as a service is a subscription like music or movies. Subscribing to a wardrobe and rotating out styles and labels, it feels like a sustainable choice because it's like a thrift store where you can turn over your clothes without guilt. You don't have to own them and then they get thrown away. They get cleaned and reused but the question is, does this model help solve fashion’s massive environmental problem?
Important Words And Terms You Should Know
We're going to talk first about some vocabulary, Product Service System or PSS. This is a business model where consumers pay for the use of a product rather than owning it. In fashion, this includes subscription rentals, one off event rentals and wardrobe libraries. There's fashion as a service, which is a type of PSS supply to clothing, where users access rotating wardrobes or designer pieces without purchasing them.
Global Warming Potential or GWP is a measure of how much a product or activity contributes to climate change, typically expressed in CO2 equivalents. Per wear impact, the environmental cost of a garment divided by the number of times it is worn. Frequent shipping and cleaning can increase the per wear impact at a fashion as a service option. Rebound effect, when one eco-friendly behavior like renting clothes then directly leads to increased consumption elsewhere potentially negating environmental benefits.
Durable garments, clothing designed to withstand repeated use and cleaning without significant wear or loss of quality. Wardrobe libraries are shared clothing collections in certain cities for users to borrow garments instead of owning them. Looking at things from a life cycle perspective, evaluating the environmental impact of a product over its entire life from production to end of life. This is important when you're looking at multiple uses.
Understanding The Environmental Aspect Of Clothing
First, let's talk about the environmental aspect of clothing and the promise that comes from fashion as a service or a rental clothing. Clothing production doubled between 2000 and 2015, but garment use dropped by nearly 40%, so enter PSS or Product Service System where you don't own the product. You just use it. For clothing, this includes subscription rentals, one-off event rentals and wardrobe libraries. From a life cycle perspective, if a single garment serves 20 to 30 customers, the emissions per wear should drop dramatically.
Some studies show that global warming potential can reduce by up to 80% if the rental fully replaces new purchases in these cases. This case is like the per wear calculation is critical. A rented dress that goes through ten shipments and five dry cleanings might not be greener than the one you already own. If you're going to buy a new one each time, then it would be greener and replacing that one time purchase is often more green.
Unveiling The Hidden Costs Of Renting Clothes
If you buy it and only wear it once and then get rid of it. Your per wear calculation is pretty high, but there are a lot of hidden costs into evaluating the rental space that you've got to consider that before this episode would not have necessarily would not be on top of mind. Transportation, a car based pickup or delivery can erase emissions savings. Especially when you have multiple trips per garment and it adds up fast because there's already transportation just in the creation of the garment itself then there's cleaning, frequent washing.
In that case, it would have to be more frequent washing than would have been done had you worn it. It's all about replacement. If it's being washed more frequently and with a more carbon intensive like an industrial dry cleaning. It would consume too much water, energy and chemicals more than would have been done at home by hand or something like that. That could be a hidden cost and then packaging, so polymer's boxes and just the return logistics.
Common Reasons Why People Rent Clothes
I have seen some of these rental companies use reusable packaging to avoid this particular aspect of hidden costs. The benefit of these rental markets depends on logistics to design like the location of hubs, batched deliveries and then potentially postal partnerships that can drastically reduce the footprint. Shifting to the consumer, why do people rent? It's often for variety. They want to maybe try different trends and convenience. It just depends on who you are. You may be somebody who goes into the office frequently and works at a stylish office like I did at Coca-Cola.
I wore a lot of pencil skirts when I first started there to keep up with the brand team. Maybe that's your vibe. I have since changed my vibe and I have a bit of a uniform. I've changed my uniform, but I haven't changed it. This jacket I've had since like before 2020. This shirt is new, but I have three of the same color. It's breathable and I can wash it less. It depends on your vibe. I made a commitment a couple of years ago that I wasn't going to buy anything I couldn't also hike in, but a lot of people aren't like that.
I have a friend who's in high fashion and it's important to her that she feels comfortable in her clothes and likes variety. They're performance is important to a lot of consumers. It needs to fit and feel good. Appearance matters. They have to look sharp or as my child says, pointy. There's also risks that come with this idea behind constantly changing your wardrobe. It can drive a mentality of overall higher consumption. For me, renting would not be a cost-saving, but if you are somebody who's buying a lot more clothes, it might be more of a cost-saving to think about renting.
How Companies And Consumers Make Fashion-As-A-Service Work
Now, it is a cost saving to me to rent for a special occasion. That is something I've done a couple of times and in my scenario, it does make sense. How can we make fashion as a service work? For companies, they need to design for durability. Garments need to be able to survive multiple wears without losing quality. Companies need to optimize their logistics. They need local distribution hubs, batch shipping, low-impact transportation and then encourage longer rentals like discounts for multi-month use and that incentivizes reducing the return frequency.
For consumers, it's important to think about renting intentionally like only for items you'll wear the right amount of times. What I mean by that is, generally what the carbon footprint or the hidden costs say is if you factor in transportation and you factor in the cleaning and everything then you need to wear an item about eight times in order for it to be more sustainable than renting that. You want to have a bit of a sweet spot.
If you are a consumer and you rent and you wear it 2 to 3 times. That would have a lower ultimate carbon footprint than maybe renting and wearing only once every time. On the flip side, if you were going to buy something, wear it only once and then throw it away. Renting would be more sustainable. For consumers, it's about thinking about that and unfortunately, just like with every sustainability topic, it's more complicated than you think it's going to be.
At the end of the day, the most sustainable choice is to buy nothing and do nothing and do not move. Make no impact on the earth, which is unreasonable. We can reduce unnecessary washing and treatment of garments and treat garments more gently to extend their life cycle. It’s like my wool shirt. I always let it dry on a drying rack because dryers can be hard on clothing and things like that. There's a platform like Hurr Collective, which is experimenting with longer terms of subscriptions and more local drop-off points to reduce that transportation emission.
We can reduce unnecessary washing and treat garments more gently to extend their life cycle.
Again, there's only so much of the rental market availability. For a company to survive, you've got to have the flexibility to ship anywhere. Fashion as a service can be a solution to the challenges and the textile market. In fact, we've seen that Rent the Runway does impact the overall market size or can be a factor in the overall market of consumption in the luxury clothing space. There is some impact in a reduction in how much material or how much clothing is made. At scale, there's impact. There's some promise but the context matters.
Making The Right Sustainability Choices Based On Closet Size
This rental model works best when rentals replace purchases and the logistics are optimized and garments are worn multiple times. It's not just like renting is a sustainable choice, but it's also not renting and buying only for the long term is a sustainable choice. It's about your behavior overall and how the rental solution may or may not be optimized. To break it down into what is that breaking point? Where is it that I'm going to be making the right sustainability choice for my clothing options? I don't want to be you and wear the same color shirt in four different colors throughout the week.
I know that buying less in general is the more sustainable choice. Let's say I want to have color and flair and differences in my wardrobe. What should I do? Should I rent or not? This depends on closet size. I don't know what your closet size is. I did not go count mine but I did search into like, what is the average closet size? It could be anywhere between like 100 to 200 or maybe 300. We did a couple of scenarios and with the assumption that you need to wear the item eight times and you might be donating or reselling or getting rid of items in your closet every year.
For the sake of math, let's assume you bring in as much as you take out. Let's assume for every piece of clothing that you bring in, you’re also donating or throwing away but preferably donating. In this math, we've assumed some donations like how many should you bring in to be more sustainable than renting? If you have 100 items in your closet and you need to wear each of those items eight times. The max you should buy per year to stay greener than renting is 12 to 13 times 13 items. Again, you assume that you're donating at least that many.
That would mean that it would take eight years for your whole wardrobe to turn over and the assumption is that you wear at least each item once a year, which is not true. There's some items you're going to wear multiple times a year. There's some items you're going to wear less but that's just the rough math. Let's assume that. Bring in no more than 12 to 13 items per year if you have 100 items closet.
If you have a 200 item closet, bring in no more than 25 items per year because that would give you eight years to work through every item in your closet. If you have 300 items in your closet, then bring in no more than 38 items per year. It's not a big number that you should be bringing in. If you do like variety, if you are interested in bringing in more than 20 to 30 new items a year then you should consider renting. That might be a more sustainable choice for you if that's what's important to you.
If you bring in way more than that, then you should rent. If you bring in less than that, then it makes sense. Less than 20 to 30 items a year, then it probably makes sense for you to not rent. At the end of the day, it's best to own fewer items, wear them longer and keep your turnover below the closet size divided by eight. If you can't or won't be able to do that, then you should rent intentionally with longer renter periods and local pickup if you can to avoid turning fashion as a service into a higher emissions habit.
It is best to own fewer items, wear them longer, and keep your turnover below your closet size divided by eight. If you cannot do this, you should rent intentionally with longer rental periods.
Fashion Is Not Disposable
Why embrace this change? It’s because fashion doesn't have to be disposable. Whether you own less and wear more or you rent smarter and shipless. The shift is about squeezing more life out of every garment. That's how we turn style into real sustainability. Thank you for your time. I'd love to hear whether or not you would rather have a uniform. I'm just kidding. You don't have to have a boring uniform or whatever. That's just where I'm at in my life but I know a lot of people aren't there. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Thank you for being here.