A sustainable three-layer circular economic model with controllable waste, emission, and wastewater from the textile and fashion industry

Abstract

The textile and clothing industries play a major role in greenhouse gas release, climate change, global warming, air pollution, water pollution, and soil damage due to the landfilling of clothes. Due to fast fashion evolution and the unnecessary lifestyles of humans, each year more than 92×106t of garment waste are produced. Only 14% of it is recycled, and the remaining is dumped on land. Addressing this big problem is urgently needed to protect the environment and reduce the massive non-renewable resource consumption rate. In this paper, a sustainable circular three-layer supply chain model consisting of a single supplier-manufacturer and multiple retailers is developed for the textile and clothing industries. Water purification technology, green technology, and carbon emission reduction concepts are introduced at the supplier stage, and zero waste techniques for the valorisation of pre-consumer textile waste, green technology, and carbon emission reduction concepts are implemented at the manufacturing stage to create sustainability in the textile and clothing industries. The profit of an integrated model is calculated, and the profit of the supplier, manufacturer, and retailer models is calculated separately by using the optimal solution finding algorithms in Mathematica 9.0. The concavity test of the total profit function is proved by using the Hessian matrix. The numerical examples, managerial implications, and sensitivity analysis are presented for the textile and clothing industries. The profit comparison results show that the integrated model profited by around 2% more than the sum of separate profits. This study found that investing in green technologies, waste minimization, and wastewater treatment technologies resulted in a decrease in related costs and environmental damage as well as increased profit.