On Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business Week: A lot of our clothes we buy end up in landfills.
Vishal Agrawal, Professor and Henry J. Blommer Family Endowed Chair in sustainable business, looks to reduce this.
Vishal Agrawal is Henry J. Blommer Family Endowed Chair in Sustainable Business, Professor of Operations and Information Management, and Academic Director, Business of Sustainability Initiative at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. His research interests and expertise extend across a variety of topics related to the role of businesses in addressing sustainability challenges such as circular economy, business model innovation, renewable energy, product development, supply chain sustainability and consumer behavior. His research has appeared in leading journals such as Management Science and M&SOM, and he has received several awards including the 2023 MSOM Young Scholar Prize, which recognizes exceptional young researchers (of age 40 years or younger) who have made outstanding contributions to scholarship in operations management.
Designing Better Clothing Take-Back Programs
The fashion industry produces more than 100 billion garments a year—and most of them eventually end up in landfills or incinerators. Take-back programs, where retailers collect used clothing from consumers, are one way to reduce this waste and shift toward a circular economy. Many fashion brands have launched take-back programs where customers can return old clothes to be reused or recycled. Big names like H&M, Nike, and Patagonia are all doing it. But consumer participation remains low despite significant environmental and financial potential.
Our research asked: how can we encourage more people to return their clothes—without relying solely on increasing the financial rewards to return their clothing.
Through experiments with consumers involving over 3200 people, we found two key levers: information about what will happen to their returned clothing and convenience of the return process. Simply telling consumers that their used clothing won’t go to a landfill made them more willing to participate. But providing too much detail—especially if it revealed that a company would profit by reselling items—actually reduced participation because consumers dislike the company directly profiting from the returned clothing.
We also found that making returns more convenient, like offering home pick-up, increased participation and did not require higher rewards. So if a company plans to reuse the returned clothing, they need to provide higher rewards or make the return more convenient to ensure consumer participation.
These insights can help retailers design more effective and sustainable take-back programs, without increasing costs – unlocking both environmental and economic benefits and bringing us one step closer to a truly circular economy.
Read More:
[SSRN] – The Role of Information, Rewards, and Convenience in Take-Back Programs for Clothing
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