Hello, I'm Tamison Ford. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC.

Today we're talking about rental fashion, something that has skyrocketed during the pandemic.

Whether you think it works or doesn't, and these are very, very early days I would caution that.

This is probably one of the most revolutionary things to hit this industry.

Could it be an answer to the fashion industry's massive sustainability problem?

Or does renting clothes bring hidden environmental costs too?

In my view, one of the greatest concerns that I have had for a long time over the rental economy is the laundry

impact. In today's Business Daily from the BBC, we take a look at the rise of rental fashion

and how it could help to clean up the fashion industry. If you're into fashion, you may have seen the recent headlines claiming renting clothes

is actually worse for the environment than throwing them away. Can that actually be true? And if so,

where did it come from? The scientific journal, Research Letters did a small study. It took

a pair of genes and compared the environmental impact of owning them in five different ways,

including renting. I think this is a very interesting study. I think it's very limited and I'm

sure that the researchers are completely aware of its limitations.

Lucy Siegel is an environmental journalist and had a look at some of the detail of this

study for us. It offers up some really good analysis which we can work with and then some of

it's kind of eccentric. So if I was to take a garment and analyze it in terms of trying to compare rental to recycling,

for example, I would not choose a pair of jeans.

So for me, within the study, there's a bias because I'm very confident that denim is not the main

rental garments or the most popular rental garment because most people own their jeans and,

you know, they fit you like a glove, don't they? I mean, that's the point of them. And also,

there's also a vogue for having sort of quite battered jeans and all the rest of it. So jeans is not a good

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