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Can Fabric Waste Become Fashion’s Resource?
24 May 2021Op-Ed
by Geoffrey Jones and Shelly Xu
24 May 2021|by Geoffrey Jones and Shelly Xu
COVID-19 worsened the textile waste crisis. Now, it s time for the fashion industry to address this spiraling problem, say
Geoffrey Jones and
COVID-19 has broken fashion’s supply chain. As a result, an already wasteful industry has become more wasteful.
Even before the pandemic, the global apparel industry was producing about 92 million tons of textile waste a year. That’s about one garbage truck’s worth of fabric waste getting landfilled or burned every second, according to a 2017 report by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.
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“Apparel is an old industry that is not doomed to being low profit and low technology. It’s in the midst of a reinvention, and that can be very exciting.”
So says John Thorbeck of Chainge Capital, a company name that is a play on words meant to communicate change in the supply chain. Thorbeck has collaborated with Stanford Professor Warren Hausman over the past decade to study supply chains outside of the apparel industry.
“We wanted to see what we could learn from the experiences of other industries,” Thorbeck said, “most notably the electronics and auto industries, that could apply to the fashion industry. Our answer is a resounding yes, there are lessons to be learned. We have focused on process innovation from those industries that might be transferrable into apparel. That learning in terms of research, case studies, models and financial metrics runs very deep and leads to our conv