Train the Trainer: Making Fashion Circular while Creating Less

Copenhagen Fashion Week Networking: Making Fashion Circular while Creating Less

By Copenhagen Fashion Week

Background

The Event

Circularity as a concept challenging the fashion industry’s linear practices of take-make-dispose, into a business models and consumer behaviours of reusing and repurposing. While circularity can limit the fashion industry’s resource use and exploitation of virgin resources, circularity cannot remain in parallel to today’s overproduction and overconsumption mindset. As such, ‘Making fashion circular while creating less’ stresses the fact that a true circular transition should curate a minimalist mindset.

This toolkit was created by Copenhagen Fashion Week, a Business Support Organisation to the Small but Perfect project, and gathers insights and topics discussed during the CPHFW Networking: Making Fashion Circular while Creating Less event (April 2023).

Why creating less in a circular fashion industry?

• To limit the severe effects of climate change, global greenhouse gas emissions need to be drastically reduced to limit global warming to less than 1.5 degrees Celsius. The fashion industry accounts for around 4% of the global emissions of greenhouse gasses, where around 70% of the fashion industry’s emissions comes from the production phase (reference). Following the growth trajectory, the industry’s GHG emissions will likely rise to around 2.7 billion tonnes a year by 2030.

• The global secondhand trade, which is an essential market within the circular ecosystem, are already experiencing the socio- and ecological effects of the fashion industry’s extensive volumes. As evident in the Atacama desert in Chile where illegal desert landfills are piling up or in Ghana, where textile waste has overrun Accra’s coastline, embedded in the sand above and below the water, causing damage to the marine ecosystem and beyond.

• To set our consumption levels in line with the 1.5-degree target, consumption of new garments should be limited to an average 5 items per year.

Case studies

This section shares case studies from four solution providers that can support fashion brands’ transition towards making fashion circular while creating less. Find below solution providers to enable your business

to re-circulate garments through renting and resale, to produce garments in a local and efficient manufacturing and to support your decarbonisation strategy with logistics solutions.

create2STAY

Prolong the wear of your brands’ clothes by enabling resale from one customer to another.

create2STAY’s purpose has from the start been to make re-commerce simple and profitable for brands so their partner brands can substitute production of new items with recommerce. They do so by helping brands launching re-commerce as part of their brand universe supporting multiple business models.

View examples from create2STAY client’s:

Lala Berlin, Les Deux, Mos Mosh and Markberg

www.create2stay.com

Fjong

Clothing rental enables a sharing economy in the fashion industry where consumers can renew their wardrobes via subscription or rent for special occasions.

Fjong is an online rental platform giving customers access to a shared wardrobe of quality clothes. The clothes are overstock from brands and retailers. FJONG thereby helps to ensure that the clothes, already produced, reach consumers and reduce waste. Through their data analysis they also provide partners with data on customer preferences, clothing qualities/weaknesses and more.

Logistics solutions that can realize a reduction of GHG’s in global supply chains.

Kuehne+Nagel are leaders on Global Freight Forwarding and Supply Chain Management, who promote global trade, while simultaneously addressing, improving, and delivering concrete solutions to the challenges the fashion industry faces. Through real time data they create an overview of transports, routings and CO2 emissions in modern and innovative environments and help to empower businesses in their decision making processes. By raising awareness on which logistics solutions exists, they help businesses take the first step to reduce emissions of supply chain practices. As official partner of Copenhagen Fashion Week, they aim to raise awareness among fashion brands on supply chain solutions.

Producing clothes locally and ondemand, creates close partnerships and efficiency.

Rodinia Generation’s mission is to make clothing production ondemand, onshore and profitable while eliminating overproduction. Their micro-factory is small in size, yet it can produce clothing 137 times faster than traditional methods. It’s also cost-effective, saving up to 14% per piece of clothing produced, while reducing the CO2 footprint of a garment by up to 98%. These micro-factories can produce clothing with zero water usage, unlike traditional methods that use thousands of liters of water just to produce one t-shirt. All of this is made possible by their in-house developed software. In a partnership with Mads Nørgaard, they created 628 unique pieces in Copenhagen made in 1 month.

dk.kuehne-nagel.com/en/ www.rodiniageneration.io/ dk.fjong.com/

Kuehne+Nagel

Rodinia Generation

Goals & potential shifts

Can a minimalist mindset challenge the constant chase of economic growth embedded in the fashion industry? To go beyond volumedriven measures of success towards other value measures? Concepts like degrowth, post growth, green growth and earth logic could guide us there!

Degrowth

A planned reduction of energy and resource use designed to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a way that reduces inequality and improves human well-being

Post growth

The place we get to once the process of degrowth has been democratically achieved

Green growth

Fostering economic growth and development while ensuring that natural assets continue to provide the resources and environmental services on which our well-being relies

Earth logic

Earth Logic is a radical plan for systems change in the fashion sector, to replace the logic of economic growth that dominates fashion today. The Earth Logic

Action Research Plan authored by Kate Fletcher and Mathilda Tham sets out a plan placing earth first –before profit, before everything.

“

Be ahead. Not behind.

TrineYoung Founder& CEO of Rodinia Generation

Reflection exercises

Reflecting on your circular and minimalist mindset

How can our costumers repair their clothes once damaged?

Do we provide a repair service or share how-to-guides?

How can we enable priceworthy solutions?

Take the opportunity to engage with your community, set up a mending workshop

Set targets ensuring an absolute emissions reduction to decouple growth from your climate impact

If 50% of our brand’s revenues streams comes from circular business models, how can you create less new and reduce your carbon footprint?

According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation circular fashion models have the potential to grow from 3.5% of the global fashion market by 2021 to 23% by 2030, representing a USD 700 billion opportunity.

How do we ensure durable clothing that can be reused by the same or by multiple costumers?

Do we conduct product testing?

Do our care instructions guide our customers how to best take care of their garments?

Be aware of ‘Emotional durability’ – creating value beyond seasonal trends that maintain a product’s relevance and desirability to a user, or multiple users, over time

When tapping into circular business models and take back schemes be aware of your new post-consumer supply chain and trace your impact

How much of the clothes are redistributed via renting/ recycling/resale or wasted?

Be aware of the socio- and environmental impact of the secondhand trade and the actual end-destination of what is traded, for example, the Kantamanto market in Ghana, sees 15 million garments every week and 40% leaves Kantamanto as waste.

Reading list & further resources

Global Fashion Agenda

Circular design Toolbox

Resale Toolbox

Fashion on Climate

Ellen MacArthur Foundation

A New Textiles Economy: Redesigning fashion’s future (2017)

Circular business models: redefining growth for a thriving fashion industry (2021)

Circular Design for Fashion

Climate change mitigation through the circular economy (2021)

Circle Economy and Shifting

Paradigms have researched how the circular economy can reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in low- and middle-income countries.