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If the fashion industry wants to tackle circularity, it must first grapple with its reverse logistics problem.
Freight is designed to traverse in one direction, wending its way through a labyrinthine but well-trafficked system of ships, planes, trains and trucks to haul goods from suppliers to warehouses to stores to someone’s front porch. Moving things in the other direction, say in the case of customer returns, is already a painful upstream challenge because it doesn’t come intuitively. Doing anything else has been positively Herculanean.
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But not, as a new report from Global Fashion Agenda and Maersk proposes, impossible. The Danish sustainability think tank and cargo juggernaut say that integrating what is currently a fragmented landscape of solutions is nothing short of imperative if brands and retailers wish to squeeze the most value out of the products they put out into the world and fend off the deluge of upcoming legislation involving eco-design and extended producer responsibility.
In an improved reverse logistics workflow, no usable product would go to waste (read: head to the landfill) but be recaptured for resale, repair, remaking or recycling. This isn’t something only tree-huggers should be clamoring for: The Ellen MacArthur Foundation estimates that changing over to a circular system can help fashion unlock a $560 billion economic opportunity. And in a survey that Global Fashion Agenda and the United Nations Environment Programme conducted earlier this year, 45 percent of brands and retailers said they plan to derive at least 10 percent of their revenue from circular business models by 2040. In other words, thriving businesses and a thriving planet don’t have to be mutually exclusive propositions, said Federica Marchionni, Global Fashion Agenda’s CEO.
“In the end, there is no other way; you have to do it,” she said.
Still, doing it is easier said than done. For one thing, there is a distinct lack of coordination among the multiple stakeholders that choreograph different parts of the supply chain, from manufacturers to retailers to recyclers to technology providers to regulatory bodies. Spawning pathways where they didn’t exist before will be resource-intensive and costly, if not without its rewards, since many apparel purveyors have set ambitious sustainability targets that can be a struggle to meet.