Greening Clothing Rental Business Models: Evaluating the Global Warming Potential of Clothing Rental Business Across Last- Mile Transportation Scenarios

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The Wharton School::Wharton Undergraduate Research::Wharton Research Scholars
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Business
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Circular Economy
Clothing
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2024
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Elkhwad, Halla
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Abstract

Clothing rental businesses have applied burgeoning circular economy frameworks to the apparel industry. This paper conducts a life cycle assessment (LCA) of U.S. based clothing rental business models across last-mile transportation scenarios and measures their global warming potential (GWP). The paper starts by replicating the five ownership and end-of-life scenarios for textiles outlined in a 2021 E.U. based study for the U.S. The scenarios include BASE, REDUCE, REUSE, RECYCLE, and RENT (SHARE). This paper finds that the ranking of the scenarios in terms of GWP remains constant when replicated for the U.S. except for the REUSE scenario. The sensitivity analysis shows that the majority of the difference in GWP between the BASE and RENT scenario can be eliminated when assuming that the rented clothing garment accounts for 5% of the product weight share transported by the consumer picking up a rented clothing item rather than 100%. This study also finds that GWP is 4.9-36.4% lower for consumers renting clothing in urban areas than rural areas.

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2024-05-01
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