Circular Economy Solutions: From Fashion to Food

Environment
 
 
By Daniel Vlahek

Article Summary

  • Fast fashion, food waste, and construction highlight how circular practices can reduce environmental damage while improving equity and livelihoods.
  • Businesses and communities worldwide are rethinking waste, from ethical denim to food redistribution and retrofitted buildings.
  • True circularity means refusing unnecessary consumption, embedding equity, and prioritising human wellbeing alongside planetary health.
 

Imagine if we treated every choice - from the clothes we pick, the food we throw away, to the houses we build - as an opportunity to rethink how we consume?

That line of questioning would starkly contrast our current economic system. “Buy more, throw away faster” is a thought deeply ingrained in our psyche.

This train of thought has also been steadily eroding our planet, as highlighted by Earth Overshoot Day. Humanity is using nature 1.7 times faster than our planet’s biocapacity can regenerate, with wealthier nations using twice the amount of resources available.

Fundamentally, this is wrong and carries the mistaken presumption that we can sustain ‘infinite growth’ on a finite (resource) planet.

The Earth Commission has stressed that carving out a ‘safe and just space’ for everyone to thrive will challenge us to rethink our consumption patterns and ultimately, how we distribute resources.

 
 

Reducing From Fast to Slow

A key element in this discourse has been embedding ‘circularity’ across industries, communities, and institutions in the face of rising material scarcity, carbon constraints, and geopolitical volatility.

Indeed, companies are now trying not only to keep resources in use for longer but also to ‘reduce’ the amount of materials required to create an end product.

With current waste quantities estimated at 92 million tonnes per year (200,000 in Australia alone), fashion has become a key industry in which ‘circular’ business decisions are being investigated, given its current poster-child status of waste, AKA ‘Fast Fashion’.

Outland Denim has established itself as a key player, not only for a garment that is ubiquitous across fashion, but also for being one of the most damaging products on the market, as highlighted by the European Union (EU) which has noted that:

  • Around 20% of global water pollution comes from textile dying and processing.
  • Fossil fuels (oil and natural gas) are a significant component of textile production worldwide, with 61% of final energy used from fuel sources.
  • Of the 75 million garment workers worldwide, only 2% (1,500,000) earn a living wage.

Conceived as a solution to human trafficking, the Outland business model aims to give young women sustainable employment through traineeships and life skills acquisition.

This, in turn, provides them with a living wage, allowing them to afford rent, health care, food, and education for themselves and their children.

The business is also focusing on embedding upstream and downstream circularity across its supply chain through investments in new water and energy-saving technology to reduce the environmental impact of each denim garment.

This is done in tandem with ethical sourcing at the beginning of the supply chain, where workers face the most exploitation.

As CEO James Bartle says, ‘sustainable employment and transitioning to a greener economy go hand in hand.’

 

Waste Less, Share More

Fashion isn’t the only industry in need of a rethink.

Consumers are often influenced through marketing and design to ‘own’ a product or, in some way, seek ‘perfect’ items for consumption.

Which is why 1.1 trillion dollars worth of food gets wasted every year. And the kicker to all that is that most of the time, that food is perfectly edible.

Food waste at a global level has an enormous impact, not only on our environment and economy, but society at large.

The world currently produces enough food to feed everyone, yet, 2.4 billion people do not have access to adequate nutrition, with 733 million people being affected by hunger each day.

And whilst a growing number of nations and economies are acting at scale to address this complex issue, the tide is still growing.

Community foodbanks are also doing their part by ‘rethinking’ food at a grassroots level.

With a network of over 200 partners, including 60,000 food pantries and meal programs, Feeding America has built a sophisticated logistics system that has enabled it to distribute over 5.3 billion meals, diverting millions of tonnes of food from going to waste.

Jerry Brown, Director of Public Relations at St Mary’s Food Bank, highlights how their partnership with Everkrisp Farm enables them to secure produce that is not suitable for retail to feed those in need:

“We distribute 120 million pounds of food per year…30 million is produce. The things we’re able to rescue off a farm…[is] some of the best nutritional food that we receive”.

That is why sharing surplus is so powerful as it is grounded in equity - helping those in need while safeguarding ecological health by keeping edible food in circulation.

 
 

Refuse New, Build Old

Whilst circularity, in principle, provides multiple solutions to curtail waste and rethink how we manage our resources, in most respects - intended or not - it continues to drive economic growth.

This has implications of course.

As early as the 19th century, Willi Stanley Jevons, an English economist, suggested that as technological advancements make a resource more efficient, it reduces the amount needed for a single application.

This, in turn, increases the overall demand, causing total consumption to rise. That’s the glaring issue with most current CE business models, which have, in some ways, fallen into the resource efficiency trap.

Does that mean we should stop pursuing a more circular future?

Of course not, but the framing needs to change if we are to keep our planetary well-being dreams alive. This is why refusing waste in the first place is key.

Take the building industry, for example.

Accounting for over a third of global greenhouse gas, including an estimated third of global waste figures, construction is a behemoth in material usage.

It's stated that 85% of 2050’s buildings already exist today, so refusing new builds to instead adapt and retrofit is the most circular choice we can make.

The AMP Centre in Sydney’s CBD, built in 1976, was an architectural marvel at the time and Australia’s tallest building.

Coming to the end of its usable lifespan, the redevelopment project team set out to achieve a lofty goal - to reuse the existing structure rather than tearing it down to create something unique.

Now known as Quay Quarter Tower, the team was able to retain over 65% of the original structure (beams, columns, and slabs) and 95% of the original core, resulting in an embodied carbon saving of 12,000 tonnes (the equivalent of 35,000 flights between Sydney and Melbourne).

What Really Matters?

Whilst some of the above may sound technical, it is an essential paradigm shift at its heart, as it asks us a straightforward question: ‘What really matters?’

This is true circular thinking, as it re-orients the system's values and goals. Instead of maximising profits, we prioritise human wellbeing and planetary health first and foremost.

Outland Denim, Feeding America, and Quay Quarter Tower have shown that it is possible. And they are part of the growing number of institutions and enterprises that are marrying ‘circularity’ with a just transition.

Maybe one day, instead of “Buy more, throw away faster”, we can comfortably “choose wisely, value more”?

Time will tell.