Feasibility of Fashion Remanufacturing: Organizing fashion value chains for circularity through remanufacturing (including redesign)

Abstract

Despite the increasing need of remanufacturing in fashion industry for leading towards dematerialization, higher revalue addition, possibility to generate highest profit margin, along with create more employment in the industry, it is still practiced on a very small scale. A net-positive environmental impact however, can only be made through remanufacturing with higher scale. However research investigations on this matter are insufficient and knowledge of the practices on new value chain models, associated processes, and designers’ approach to the product development process is still limited. The general aim of this study is to investigate how remanufacturing can be made feasible industrially for sustainable competitiveness in the fashion industry. This feasibility study was conducted by Re:Textile group in collaboration with several Swedish players, e.g. fashion branded retailers, local textile and apparel manufacturers, and charities. 3 participatory action projects were developed between 2017-2018 in order to elucidate the different possibilities of organizing remanufacturing in fashion industry context, and check the viability of these options. 3 different fashion remanufacturing models were considered to be interesting via literature review, and were planned for further exploration. These were: scaled remanufacturing, distributed redesign and PSS redesign-as-a-service. The study identifies the key decision making variables in each of these models, the critical success factors and also in connection assessing the feasibility of each model by constructing various scenarios.Re:textil