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Fashion rentals: Sustainable alternative or license to waste?

Save this one for special occasions

This story is a part of one5c’s guide to sustainable fashion. Read more about how to ditch fast fashion, fast fashion’s climate impacts, the complexities of textile recycling, and how to spot high-quality clothes.

The fashion industry is a waste-making machine: Every second, a garbage truck’s worth of clothes lands in the incinerator or gets otherwise burned or landfill worldwide.1 In the U.S. alone, consumers collectively throw away around 17 million metric tons of textiles a year—that’s nearly 6% of all municipal waste.2 

Fashion rentals present themselves as a potential antidote to the fast fashion machine that churns through materials, energy, time, and money. These offer shoppers the ability to try our trends and send garments back to get cleaned and recirculated to someone else to wear and love. Conceptually, these services make perfect sense as a sustainable alternative to buying (and buying and buying)—particularly when you need something for a special occasion—but there are some pros and cons.

What are fashion rentals?  

The fashion rental concept is simple: choose an item you’d like to wear and how long you’d like to keep it. You wear it, then return it. Originating in the late 19th century for formalwear items such as suits and tuxedos, the model fell out of favor in the early 2000s when fast fashion and its cheap prices meant consumers could buy an outfit for the same price as a rental—or sometimes even less. But over the past decade, rental duds have experienced a revival. 

Rent the Runway was the modern trailblazer. The service launched in 2009 and offered access to designer outfits at a fraction of the sticker price. A flurry of fashion rental services followed in the mid-to-late 2010s. Armoire, Nuuly, Tulerie, and Nova Octo expanded what customers could rent to include accessories, workwear, and casual wear. 

Are fashion rentals a sustainable choice?

Not exactly. The major sustainability selling point of fashion rentals is their ability to keep clothes in circulation longer—and potentially also reduce the need to produce so many new duds in the first place. Unfortunately, production is only part of the picture, which means fashion rentals aren’t a perfectly sustainable option. 

Estimates vary, but the fashion industry produces somewhere between 80 and 150 billion items per year.34 According to a 2021 lifecycle assessment, Rent the Runway claims its model has displaced the need for the production of 1.6 million new garments since 2010. The results of that analysis further showed that renting a garment results in a 24% reduction in water usage, a 6% reduction in energy usage, and a 3% reduction in CO2 emissions compared to purchasing a new item.

This analysis, however, comes with an important asterisk. Displacing the need for production is a theoretical measure, and isn’t the same as actually stopping production itself; that means these benefits bake in a hopeful assumption that people also slow their shopping habits. 

The production of clothing accounts for 71% of the fashion industry’s emissions, according to one report.5 The authors found that reducing overproduction at the brand side by 10% could reduce emissions by around 158 million metric tons in 2030—about the equivalent of 41 coal-fired power plants running for a year. 

Production, however, is only one part of the picture. Most of fashion rentals’ impacts accumulate behind the scenes as items circulate through the system. Major platforms like Rent the Runway and Nuuly dry clean clothes, which uses between three and six times the energy of “wet” cleaning.6 (Though they do avoid the toxic and soon-to-be-phased-out solvent perchloroethylene (PERC).) Once cleaned, items are often wrapped up like new, exacerbating another environmental issue: plastic pollution. Some platforms, including Rent the Runway and Nuuly, are switching to reusable mailing bags, but they’re not eliminating protective plastic wrapping and hangers altogether, meaning every delivery comes with a degree of waste. 

The environmental impact of deliveries can add up too. Though there’s no concrete data on the transportation of fashion rentals, analysis of more general ecommerce impacts can offer helpful insights. Last mile deliveries (that’s when goods go from a warehouse or fulfilment center to your home) could prompt a 32% jump in carbon emissions by 2030 due to increased consumer expectations for both at-home convenience and speedy delivery.7 Every rental also gets returned, which, taken together, can generate as much as 350,000 metric tons of carbon emissions, similar to that of the total yearly carbon emissions of Samoa.8 

Walking, biking, or taking public transit to a local rental store to collect and return items can, according to one 2021 study, significantly slash the impact of transportation by 85% and of the rental overall by 15%.9 But if you’d be driving, making use of an online fashion rentals service that uses electric vehicles could be a better choice. U.K.-based HURR partners with an EV delivery company, but similar options aren’t readily available in the U.S.

To rent or not to rent

For rentals to truly have a lower impact than shopping, the key is to use it sparingly.  Some platforms offer edited monthly bundles of as many as 20 items, encouraging the use of rental for everyday wear. But a constant supply of new clothes—though tempting—comes with the environmental impacts of delivery, packaging, and returns.

A wedding guest outfit, a beach vacation wardrobe, a smart outfit for an interview, a snowsuit for a skiing trip? All great candidates for rental. They’re clothes you only need temporarily, you get them for less than the purchase price, and you skip the guilt of seeing them hanging in your closet unworn or the waste of throwing them away. It’s all about balance.

Rental is perfect for one-off needs, but the rest of the time the best decision you can make—for the climate, your wallet, and your closet space—is to wear what you already own. Just nine months of extra wear can reduce a garment’s carbon footprint by 33% and water and waste footprint by 22%, respectively. It all comes down to extending the initial impacts of production over a longer timespan.10


  1. Redesigning the Future of Fashion, Ellen MacArthur Foundation ↩︎
  2. Textiles: Material-Specific Data, United States Environmental Protection Agency, Nov. 2024 ↩︎
  3. ‘The True Cost’ documentary tallies global effect of cheap clothes, Los Angeles Times, May 2015 ↩︎
  4. Our Love of Cheap Clothing Has a Hidden Cost – It’s Time for a Fashion Revolution, World Economic Forum, Apr. 2016 ↩︎
  5. Fashion on Climate, McKinsey & Company and Global Fashion Agenda, 2020 ↩︎
  6. Does Use Matter? Comparison of Environmental Impacts of Clothing Based on Fiber Type, Sustainability, Jul. 2018 ↩︎
  7. The Sustainable Last Mile, Accenture ↩︎
  8. Solving Fashion’s Product Returns, British Fashion Council, Mar. 2023 ↩︎
  9. Innovative Recycling or Extended Use? Comparing the Global Warming Potential of Different Ownership and End-Of-Life Scenarios for Textiles, IOP Publishing, May 2021 ↩︎
  10. Design for Longevity, WRAP, May 2013 ↩︎