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1. Introduction
The fashion industry has been identified as one of the major impact factors on climate change and environmental pollution. Adverse ecological impacts stem from harmful manufacturing processes involving toxic chemicals and residue, short product lifecycles and a large amount of waste instead of recycled goods. In 2017, it was estimated that 20 garments were produced per person and year (Drew and Yehounne, 2017), which is attributed to fast fashion ideals. Compared to two traditional annual fashion cycles, fast fashion exhibits about 50, i.e. almost weekly changes are made to the portfolio and garments are reduced in their lifetime, being only kept half as long as in the year 2000 (Drew and Yehounne, 2017). Fast fashion influences evoke short life cycles, high volatility, affordable prices and impulse purchases (Cesarina Mason et al., 2022), which makes it both attractive for consumers and harmful for the environment.
The extant literature has analyzed the ecological and social impact of fast fashion and provided numbers for carbon emission (carbon dioxide equivalents, or CO2e), water usage and waste material. Producing textiles is considered one of the most substantial pollution, accumulating to 1.2 billion tons of CO2e annually, which is partly caused by the large manufacturing quantities in China and India on a coal-powered basis (Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2017). In addition, about 92 million tons of waste and 79 trillion liters of water consumption impact the environment (Niinimäki et al., 2020). Besides energy production based on coal and fossil fuels, the type of fabric that is produced influences the products' footprint: synthetic materials, particularly polyester, are the most common materials in clothing production, accounting for more than half of the materials in global supply chains in 2018 (Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2017; Niinimäki et al., 2020). Consumers could retain about $460 billion in value annually if they continued to use clothing instead of throwing it away, and less than 1% of material was recycled to become new garment in 2017 (Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2017). Although difficult to quantify, the missed economic opportunities due to linear production cycles (i.e. linear business models, Johnson and Plepys, 2021) are estimated to yield €160 billion in 2030, stemming both from ecological and social effects (Global Fashion Agenda &...