We applaud Ken Pucker for reminding industry leaders of their critical role in businesses’ adoption of more sustainable practices to foster a circular economy. We agree with his call for accelerating cross-sector collaboration in manufacturing for these practices to gain traction. If the fashion industry is genuinely committed to transitioning to a circular economy, it must abandon siloed thinking and embrace a collaborative business mindset to establish responsible and closed-loop production patterns to reduce waste.
Collaboration is an essential driver for discovering and scaling innovative approaches that can move the fashion industry toward circularity. We believe industrial symbiosis is one such approach that holds great promise. Pioneered by industrial environmental management scholar Marian R. Chertow, industrial symbiosis is a method that separate industries have adopted to band together and gain a competitive advantage by exchanging materials, energy, water, and by-products. The approach addresses textile waste by transforming one industry’s refuse into a resource for another. Both the European Union and the European Commission have adopted the strategy to promote circularity.
Reducing resource consumption and reusing what we already possess—two of the 3R strategies for mitigating waste (reduce, reuse, and recycle)—are fundamental to the industrial symbiosis approach. Considering the critical role that it can play in promoting responsible production patterns, we are surprised that Pucker alludes to the method only when he mentions the challenge of connecting waste streams to recycling production. Specifically, he posits that overconsumption, the greatest contributor to textile waste, remains “the source of the greatest leverage” for fashion to achieve circularity, yet also “the hardest to change.” As Pucker observes, the fashion industry’s prevailing linear economy generates inexpensive, disposable products that encourage high consumption levels essential to fashion businesses’ profitability and success—hence his main critique of the corporations he refers to as Sustainability Inc., whose collective circular efforts amount to minor adjustments of their long-standing linear business models.
Breaking dependence on deeply entrenched linear norms and business models requires a substantial investment of financial and technical resources. Yet the risk and uncertainty associated with the initial costs of transitioning to circular business models, coupled with concerns about the models’ profitability, causes these incumbent companies to be less agile at identifying opportunities for circular practices and cross-sector collaboration than medium-size enterprises in the fashion industry are.
Companies hesitant to embrace circularity could benefit from in-depth research illustrating successful instances of industrial symbiosis, which can guide their transition to a circular business model. Our findings from the Circular Economy Research Center (CERC) reveal that the circular economy fundamentally alters the production and consumption of goods and services. The urgent challenge from a business perspective is achieving sustainable economic growth while safeguarding the natural environment. At CERC, we are witnessing increasing evidence that business models, industrial symbiosis, and entrepreneurship are crucial for the success of circular economies. These elements enable the creation of innovative, sustainable, and economically viable solutions that emphasize resource efficiency and environmental protection. Small- and medium-size businesses, alongside multinational corporations, can transform their operations by investing in industrial symbiosis and recognizing the strategic significance of cross-sector collaboration and circular-economy partnerships.
Industrial symbiosis, however, does not alone provide a comprehensive solution to the global consumption problem or the effects of overconsumption on the climate. But it does possess tremendous potential to advance endeavors toward carbon neutrality while generating micro- and macroeconomic benefits. Major corporations with extensive global value chains can employ industrial symbiosis to address the numerous barriers to circularity Pucker enumerates. Additionally, they can advocate for reduce and reuse—the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal of responsible consumption and production patterns—by committing to new business models that generate revenues based on optimized resources flows decoupled from raw-material production.
Ultimately, experts like Pucker should affirm industrial symbiosis as a viable solution to the fashion industry’s numerous sustainability challenges so that it can gain widespread acceptance.
Read more stories by Giorgos Demetriou, Claire Hammon & Valentina Ort.