Fashion comes with a high environmental cost and impact, making it necessary to rethink processes, materials and business models in a way that society can meet its needs for new garments without damaging the planet and stressing its natural resources.

Designing supply chains that involve the reverse logistics stage and include both post-industrial and post-consumer textile waste is a crucial step to ensure that all stakeholders play their role in ensuring that materials will continue on a circular flow.

There are of course challenges, but remanufacturing has the potential to reduce reliance on virgin materials, create possibility to regenerate value on the same material, and importantly, reduce textile waste going to landfills.

It’s safe to say that the way the fashion industry operates goes completely against what sustainability means. The fashion industry is rooted in planned obsolescence, with brands and designers launching new trends and estimulating fast consumption and quick disposal. Clothes and accessories are in and out of fashion in the blink of an eye and as a consequence, many European countries including the UK are registering a rise in the levels of textile waste.

Hyperconsumption and throwaway culture are thus responsible for creating an imbalance between the planet and our industrial activities, making the development of new industrial and manufacturing systems essential to recapture the value of materials.

The importance of remanufacturing emanates from the fact that it is able to recirculate materials by creating virgin material equivalents with them through industrial processes, thus reducing the need for virgin material inputs without restraining a designer’s possibilities and creativity.

Unfortunately, it remains restricted to a small-scale as it requires manual work, such as analysing by hand the repeatability of a fabric and disassembling garments.

Presumably, the real benefits of remanufacturing would be seen through the recapture of greater quantities of textiles, which hasn’t been occuring in the fashion industry. Therefore, it is imperative to achieve higher productivity levels while maintaining the quality and, possibly, removing the barriers posed to designers by contaminants that go into textiles.

Designing supply chains that involve the reverse logistics stage and include both post-industrial and post-consumer textile waste. This is a crucial step to ensure that all stakeholders play their role in ensuring that materials will continue on a circular flow. This is also important as currently, supply chain diagrams and studies often end at the point of sale, and that is because we have been living in a linear economy where businesses haven’t yet understood the economic benefits that circular textiles can bring them.

To minimise the risk that retailers feel they have when offering remanufactured clothes, a possible solution is to prefer online sales instead of brick-and-mortar. That would reduce the risk of shipping those garments to stores where the target consumer isn’t interested in remanufactured fabrics and products and not willing to pay a higher price for them. Online retail also offers the chance to create a more interactive platform where the brand and/or retailer can inform the consumer on the manufacturing process of the garment through marketing tools.

The authors also suggest that designers should design garments with the post-consumer stage in mind, meaning that they should consider ways in which it would be easier for remanufacturers to disassemble, clean and remanufacture items.

Remanufacturing has the potential to reduce the need for resource extraction and production and can also reduce the number of post-consumer textile waste going to landfills, both of which would help minimise the impact that fashion supply chain’s have on the environment.

Establishing and creating the appropriate infrastructure for remanufacturing through an effective reverse logistics system, would also allow remanufacturing to be scaled up and reach higher levels of productivity. If the standardization of processes and knowledge share on remanufacturing were amplified, remanufacturing could also have its costs reduced, as there would be more competition and more efficiency in its processes.

Although, keeping in mind that reverse logistics is still a very time consuming and labour-intensive process as all second hand clothes are sorted into different categories and groups depending on their colour, size, material and quality. Remanufacturing also still constrains designers and brands as often designers need to work with the limited availability of materials that a textile manufacturer has, which then comes with other limitations such as colors and quality.

But all in all, increased resource efficiency would not only benefit the environment by creating balance between our needs as consumers and the planet’s restorative boundaries, but it would also benefit businesses. That can be explained for two reasons: less reliance on virgin materials, which results in scarcity, and the possibility to regenerate value on the same material, resulting in reduced costs for material inputs.

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