Now let’s think about an assembly line. First of all, notice the shape: we’ve got a line, not a loop. Think about the first assembly line, invented for the model T Ford. It began with materials, mostly steel, and ended with a car. What happened after the car was driven off the lot wasn’t really thought about. Of course, that was fine back when there were a ton of people and so few cars. But today, there are more than 1 billion cars on the road worldwide. And it turns out the car industry has developed a pretty good closed loop system. Our friends at Schnitzer Steel made a nice little video explaining how our old cars get recycled into new steel for new cars. The steel industry is so good at recycling that 95% of steel gets recycled.

The same cannot be said about the fashion industry. In America, each one of us throws out 70 pounds of clothing each year. And instead of reduce, reuse, recycle, we have a new system in place, thanks to fast fashion: acquire more, throwaway, replace. It’s because of this system that fashion is now one of the most polluting industries in the world. Enormous environmental resources are spent either drilling for oil (polyester) or growing cotton for us to just wear a few times and then throw it all out.