Closed Loop Fashion: How the Products of Today can Become the Resources of Tomorrow

It is obvious now that we are not going to recycle our way out of the waste problem plaguing our planet and we cannot pull plastic and rubbish out of the oceans at the rate we are putting it in. Burying it in the ground is not a long-term solution and burning it is just plain wasteful — not to mention highly polluting. So, we need to look at this problem in a different way. Instead of trying to work out how to deal with a pile of waste, we need to stop that waste being created in the first place. The answer — spoiler alert! — is a<a href="https://ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/topics/circular-economy-introduction/overview" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank"> circular economy or closed loop system</a>. For plastics, that means eliminating all the plastic we can do without, reusing as much as we can through new business models, and circulating all the rest. There is no doubt that plastic is a useful and versatile material, but according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation we currently throw away USD 80–120 billion of it every year globally — so let’s keep hold of it. The same goes for other raw materials such as cotton — although cotton can biodegrade relatively fast in the right conditions it faces its own challenges. With resources stretched and global costs rising in labour, cotton is fast becoming a precious commodity. Conventionally-grown cotton is a <a href="https://www.ul.com/news/trouble-cotton-sustainability" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">high water consumer</a>, a heavy pollutant of greenhouse gas emissions and it also uses a lot of harmful pesticides and fertilisers causing soil degradation. Over consuming cotton just because it can biodegrade at the end of its life only exacerbates the problem at the start. <a href="https://medium.com/@javanhoen/closed-loop-fashion-how-the-products-of-today-can-become-the-resources-of-tomorrow-3d2359cf4118">Visit Now</a>