- Luxury fashion brands are upcycling and embracing resale to reduce the industry’s massive pollution problem
This article is part of the daily Karma newsletter. To get the whole newsletter delivered to your email free every morning, subscribe here.
Luxury fashion conjures images of runways and lifestyles of the rich and famous. But it probably evokes little in the way of reducing the mountains of discarded clothing every year or building a bridge to a circular economy.
Fashion at all prices has waste in its DNA, a fact the industry began to widely acknowledge after a 2017 report, endorsed by designer Stella McCartney, that found consumers and designers wasted more than $500 billion worth of clothing each year. Further, the 1.2 billion tons of carbon emissions produced by the textiles industry annually was more than that of all international flights and maritime shipping combined, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation study said.
“Many industries are fairly straightforward in how they mess up the planet. When I got to fashion, I was just floored, both in terms of the magnitude of the impact, but also the complexity of the impact,” Vanessa Barboni Hallik, who launched the sustainable luxury brand Another Tomorrow after 15 years as an investment banker at Morgan Stanley, said in an interview with Karma.
In Other News
The EPA rescinds methane regulations (unclear how cows are responding). PPP’s failure and pre-existing problems mean that Black-owned businesses are twice as likely to fail. Meet the top female investors in eastern Europe. A new study measures the effectiveness of impact investment wholesale funds. Can the small business funding conversation move beyond venture capital? As private prisons come under fire from activists, most are trying to quickly shed debt.
Levity Break
Turn your dog into a Disney character!
