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1. Introduction
Fashion consumption has been increasing constantly all over the world. In the USA alone, 15.1 million tons of textiles were disposed of in 2013 (US EPA, 2015) compared to 7.4 million tons in 1995 and 2.5 in 1980 (US EPA, 2003). In the UK, it is estimated that between 0.8 and 1 million tons of apparel are sent to landfills yearly; among them, a minimum of 151,300 tons of clothing and footwear could be directly reused (Bartlett et al., 2013). In Germany alone, there are about 5.2 billion pieces of clothes in adults’ (between 19 and 69 years old) wardrobes; on average each person has 95 pieces of clothing, excluding socks and underwear (Greenpeace, 2015). The fast fashion trend generates environmental and social hazards (Claudio, 2007), increases clothing turnover and consequently results in greater end-of-life clothing waste (DEFRA, 2008). Textiles have been recognized as the fastest growing fraction of private household waste in the UK (DEFRA, 2008). There are similar statistics all around the world. These astonishing numbers reveal the need for urgent material reduction strategies in the fashion industry. It has been emphasized that the reduction of disposed textiles is the single greatest unused economic and environmental opportunity within fashion industry (Bartlett et al., 2013).
For many years, the emphasis was on producing more sustainable products and encouraging consumers to purchase such products. However, it is clear now that this strategy of substituting products is not as effective as previous estimates held it to be (Peattie and Peattie, 2009). More importantly, it is remarkable that up to 60 percent of the environmental impact of products comes from the consumption stage of their product lifecycle, e.g. from cleaning and fast replacement (Koefoed and Skov, 2010). WRAP (2012) conducted research to identify overall patterns of environmental impact, based on estimates of the quantities and impacts of clothing at each stage of the lifecycle. Taking into consideration that the data used in this study reflect approximations, it was estimated that one quarter of the carbon food print of the clothing lifecycle comes from the usage phase and that the post-usage phase accounts for almost two-third of the whole lifecycle waste (WRAP, 2012). It seems that changing lifestyles to be more sustainable requires not...