The Road To Circularity

What’s the problem with fashion?

Today, the fashion industry is an increasingly unsustainable system that contributes to climate change. Over the past 20 years, fashion consumption has increased by 400%¹, while fashion utilization, meaning the amount of time we use an item, has decreased by 36%²—with 85% of fashion reaching end of life in landfill or incineration.³ This accelerating need for more and more production to fuel lower and lower utility is contributing to a projected 50% surge in greenhouse gas emissions from the fashion industry by 2030.⁴

What’s Coach doing about it?

At Coach, we are investing significantly to improve the sustainability of this system, for example committing to 100% renewable energy and 95% traceability of materials by 2025 and to reaching net zero carbon emissions by at least 2050. However, we’ve also come to face a hard truth: that while these investments and efforts are absolutely crucial—they are not sufficient. To fundamentally transform fashion’s impact, we need to address the core challenge of fashion which is that it is a linear, and therefore unsustainable system.

a diagram showing the percentage of the amount of energy used in the production of clothing

Our current, linear economy

So, what do we mean by a linear system? Also referred to as a take-make-waste system, this way of producing and consuming products is the way almost all industries, including fashion, have operated since the Industrial Revolution.

In a linear system, producers extract natural resources from the earth to create new materials and use energy, water and chemicals to make products—creating carbon emissions at every stage. They then distribute these products to consumers and, at this point, the producer’s responsibility ends. When a consumer is finished with a product, they have various options, but the easiest is simply to throw it out. The product and its materials often end up in landfill, and the producer extracts more new materials to create more new products. It’s a one-way—and ever accelerating—linear journey from production to landfill that contributes to climate change and the global crisis of waste. Today, we are reaching the limits of this system.

Building a circular economy

In a circular system, we reimagine both start of life and end of life, with the goal of turning the straight line of the linear system into a “closed loop,” in which materials aren’t wasted, but reused, and new products are made from old ones.

We begin by avoiding the creation of new materials—which accounts for 38% of fashion’s greenhouse gas emissions⁵—by repurposing and recycling the vast amount of stuff that already exists on our planet—from waste destined for landfill to deadstock materials and pre-loved products. And we eliminate waste wherever possible—both by reimagining waste as a valuable raw material and designing out waste in the first place.

Next, we keep materials and products in use and circulation—and out of landfill—by designing them to live longer, to be repaired more easily and, when no longer usable in first life, to be more easily disassembled into their component materials and parts in order to be remade or recycled for a second life. To make this work, we design from the very beginning thinking about second and third life.

Lastly, we reimagine a product’s end of life, taking on the responsibility for what we produce by offering to take it back, and creating scalable pathways for returned products to be reused, remade and recycled into new products.

Coachtopia’s circular mission

In Coachtopia, we’re working towards this ideal vision of circularity through our Made Circular design philosophy, a set of principles that inspire how we craft, design and reuse products. Our ultimate goal, in doing so, is to decouple the activity of making and consuming beautiful things from the use of finite resources and, in doing so, to minimize our negative impact on the planet. But we know that getting there is going to be a collective journey. As we continue to build Coachtopia, we’re committed to taking the bold, yet always imperfect steps that will bring us continuously closer to our circular future. To learn more about how we’re doing it, visit our About Pages.