Is Renting Clothes Greener than Buying Them?

Clothing rental is a hot new industry and retailers are demanding to get on board in hopes of attracting green shoppers. But is renting fashion actually more     1    than buying it, and if so, how much more? Journalist and author Elizabeth Cline investigated this question and concluded that it’s not as environmentally-friendly as it seems.

Take     2    , for example, which has to go two ways if an item is rented—receiving and returning. Cline writes that consumer transportation has the second largest carbon footprint of our collective fashion habit after     3    . She writes,” An item ordered online and then returned can send out 20 kilograms of carbon each way, and increases up to 50 kilograms for rush shipping. By comparison, the carbon impact of a pair of jeans     4    from a physical store and washed and worn at home is 33.4 kilograms, according to a 2015 study by Levi’s.”

Then there’s the     5    of washing, which has to happen for every item when it’s returned, regardless of whether or not it was worn. For most rental services, this usually means dry cleaning, a high impact and polluting process. All the rental services that Cline looked into have     6    perchloroethylene(全氯乙烯), a carcinogenic(致癌的)air pollutant that is still used by 70 percent of US dry cleaners, with hydrocarbon alternatives, although these aren’t great either.

Lastly, Cline fears that rental services will increase our     7    for fast fashion, simply because it’s so easily accessible. There’s something called “share washing” that makes people engage in more     8    behaviors precisely because a product or service is shared and thus is regarded as more eco-friendly. Uber is one example of this, advertised as “a way to share rides and limit car ownership,” and yet ”it has been proven to     9    walking, bicycling, and public transportation use.”

Renting clothes is still     10    to buying them cheap and throwing them in the dustbin after a few wears, but we shouldn’t let the availability of these services make us too satisfied. There’s an even better step—and that’s wearing what is already in the closet.

Planet Plastic

Here’s a shocking statistic. Scientists have calculated the total amount of plastic ever made: 8.3 billion tonnes. Looked at another way, that’s as heavy as 25,000 Empire State Buildings or one billion elephants. And     1    , almost all of it has been made in the last 65 years.

So what’s the problem? Much plastic is in the form of packaging which is used just once and then thrown away. According to a major new study from the University of California, 9% of this is     2    , 12% is burned and 79% goes to landfill. And because most plastic doesn’t biodegrade (生物降解), once it’s in the ground, it stays there.

It’s a situation that has led the paper’s lead author, ecologist Dr. Roland Geyer, to say that we are “rapidly     3     towards ‘Planet Plastic’”. He believes that there’s already enough waste out there to cover the whole of Argentina.

The team behind this report also estimate that eight million tonnes of plastic waste are     4     into the sea every year. This has     5     concern that plastic is entering the food chain through fish and other sea life which consume the smaller pieces.

Of course, the reason why there’s so much plastic around is that it’s an amazingly useful material. We can’t get enough of it. It’s durable and     6    , and is used for everything from yoghurt pots to spaceships. But it’s    7     this quality that makes it a problem. The only way to destroy plastic is to heat or burn it — although this has the side effect of harmful emissions.

So what’s the     8     other than using less plastic? Oceanographer (海洋学家) Dr. Erik van Sebille from Utrecht University says we’re facing a flood of plastic waste, and that the     9     waste industry needs to “get its act together”.

Professor Richard Thompson, a marine biologist from Plymouth University, says it’s poor design that is at fault. He says that if products are currently designed “with recyclability in mind”, they could be recycled around 20 times over.

Dr. Geyer agrees: “The     10     of recycling is to keep material in use and in the cycle forever if you can. But it turns out in our study that actually 90% of that material that did get recycled — which I think we calculated was 600 million tonnes — only got recycled once.”