Clothing rental services promise a sustainable alternative to fast fashion. Experts say it depends

For weddings, vacations or other special occasions, more consumers are turning to clothing rental services instead of buying something new.

These subscription-based services, often marketed as a sustainable alternative to fast fashion, ship straight to customers everything from everyday and workwear to dresses, handbags and formalwear. Then, the items are returned for someone else to use.

“I haven’t bought anything for a big occasion since 2019,” said Sasha Eck, a user of clothing rental services.

Along with giving her continuous and affordable access to newer, trendier clothes, she said renting formalwear made more sense than spending the equivalent of a month's rent on a dress she would only wear once. A recent survey from ThredUp suggests others face the same predicament, with the resale platform finding 87% of wedding guests said they had purchased at least one outfit they wore only once.

Clothing rental services appear to be an environmentally ethical alternative: One garment can be worn by multiple people instead of being tethered to a single closet. But fashion and logistics experts say the reality of rental subscriptions is more complicated, especially once shipping, returns and consumer habits are factored in.

Kate Fletcher, a professor of sustainability, design and fashion systems at Manchester Metropolitan University, said rental services can sometimes encourage the same mindset that drives fast fashion.

“In theory, the embodied resources within that garment get a chance to be worked harder by having that many more people wear it. And so that’s the sort of compelling argument of it,” she said.

But Fletcher said many of those environmental benefits can be undermined by repeated shipping, returns and cleaning.

Aja Barber, a sustainability consultant and writer, said people often overlook the footprint of those processes.

“When you think about rental, you don’t think about the packaging that comes every time you get something from rental. You don’t think about the carbon footprint of shipping the item to you. And you certainly don’t think about the carbon footprint of dry cleaning,” said Barber.

Still, both experts said rental services can have advantages in certain situations.

“If you are someone who occasionally has to wear occasion-wear and you don’t want to buy a dress that you’re going to wear just once, I think it can be really impactful,” said Barber.

Fletcher pointed to older, more localized rental models, like with suit or gown rentals, where customers visited a shop, were fitted in person and later returned the item. She said those systems often had a very different environmental profile than modern, app-based rental services that rely on repeated shipping.

The rise of online shopping has heightened the environmental affect of “last mile delivery" — the final stage of transporting a package from a fulfillment center to a customer’s home. Transportation is already one of the largest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions, said Johanna Amaya, assistant professor of supply chain management at Pennsylvania State University.

“The more deliveries going to our homes, the more delivery that goes to our preferred location, the more that impact on the environment,” said Amaya.

Rental services can also create an added logistical challenge because the process involves two trips — one to deliver the clothing and another to return it.

Amaya said fast shipping can also make delivery systems less efficient because companies have less time to consolidate packages into fuller routes.

“The longer they can wait to consolidate more orders and use the capacity of the delivery vehicles, the better,” said Amaya.

She added that returning items to centralized locations, like parcel lockers or post offices, may be less environmentally impactful than home pickup services.

Experts say renting can still be a better option in some situations, particularly for special occasion outfits that may otherwise only be worn once. But they also said consumers should think carefully about how often they are ordering, shipping and returning clothing.

Fletcher encouraged people to “look within a wardrobe and yourself before you look without and try and get a new piece.”

Amaya said consumers can reduce the environmental impact by avoiding rush shipping and choosing consolidated or pickup delivery options when possible.

And the broader sustainability challenge in fashion cannot be solved by a single service or product alone, Fletcher said.

For consumers trying to shop more sustainably overall, experts said some of the simple options may still be the most effective, like re-wearing clothing, repairing items, swapping with friends, buying secondhand or donating pieces so they continue to be used.

“The best thing we can do is engage with fashion as a practice. So, a lived experience of what it is to be dressed — full of capabilities of who I can be in the world — and not as something to buy,” Fletcher said. “Fashion as shopping, that sort of idea of it, is something that industry has encouraged us to believe is the only way of engaging with fashion. And fundamentally, that’s only going to lead to more climate impacts.”

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FILE - Brenda Thompson, right, loads packages into a container at the FedEx hub at Los Angeles International Airport, Dec. 2, 2013, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File)

FILE - Madeline Smith packages clothing for shipments as she works for Armoire, a clothing-rental company based out of The Riveter, a women-focused shared workspace facility in Seattle, Jan. 11, 2019. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren, File)

FILE - Workers push carts loaded with goods past an employee who adjusts clothing on the mannequins at a fashion boutique in Beijing, Oct. 13, 2021. (AP Photo/Andy Wong, File)

FILE - Vara Pikor returns an item at a clothing rental store in New York on Nov. 25, 2019. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig, File)

Three more cases of the New World screwworm have been confirmed, including one outside the main cluster in Texas, demonstrating the difficulty of stopping a resurgent pest that could devastate the nation's cattle industry, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced Monday.

The screwworm is actually a fly larva that eats living flesh instead of dead material. The flies lay their eggs in open wounds of animals like cattle, but wildlife, pets and occasionally even humans can be infested. The government has a program to breed sterile male flies and drop swarms of them from planes to mate with wild females, which kept screwworm contained at the southern end of Panama for decades.

So far, there are five confirmed cases: three calves and a goat in Texas and a dog from neighboring Lea County, New Mexico. The small dog, which the USDA initially reported as a Texas case, lives in New Mexico and was reclassified as the first in that state.

The dog had not traveled to Mexico or Texas, so authorities were investigating around the property where the pet lived. If they find infected flies, animal inspections in the area will increase, New Mexico State Veterinarian Samantha Holeck said during a virtual news conference Monday.

The first two screwworm cases were discovered last week in calves a few miles apart in south Texas. A case was announced Monday in a calf in La Salle County, southwest of San Antonio, and in a goat in Gillespie County, west of Austin.

In each case, officials have set up a 12-mile (20-kilometer) quarantine zone to try to slow the parasite's advance.

Along with cattle and other warm-blooded livestock, scientists worry screwworms could devastate the millions of wild white-tailed deer in Texas.

Scientists expect new cases could pop up in the coming days and weeks, but it doesn't mean screwworm is spreading rapidly, said Edward Burgess, a University of Florida entomologist who studies the fly.

“When that first case is seen, everyone is being vigilant and their eyes are on it more intensely,” Burgess said. “And when you are looking for something, you are more likely to see it.”

Screwworm gets its name from the maggots’ habit of burrowing — or screwing — into a wound, according to the USDA. The pest eats the flesh of the animal, further opening wounds and increasing the risk of deadly bacterial infections. Animals can die within a few weeks if not treated. There are a dozen government-approved medications to treat livestock.

The agency and the U.S. cattle industry have been racing to prevent an outbreak since screwworm was detected in Mexico late in 2024. The USDA has been dropping sterile flies in south Texas since February and is working to both increase sterile fly production in plants outside the U.S. and build a $750 million fly factory in Texas.

So far, screwworm's reappearance hasn’t greatly affected beef prices, which are already near record levels because there are fewer cows in the United States. Although the parasite attacks live cattle, it does not infest meat or fruit.

Canada temporarily stopped importing cattle, horses or other livestock from Texas on Friday. The parasites prefer humid areas where temperatures are at least 77 F (25 C), making them more of a summer problem up north.

Burgess said the long-term solution — breeding sterile male flies — is months away. Since wild female flies mate just once, if that encounter is with a sterile male, outbreaks can eventually be halted as the flies die out.

The goal is to have enough sterile flies to stop the pests from returning in 2027 after the winter kills off most of them, USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins said at a news conference at the U.S. Livestock Insects Research Laboratory in Kerrville, Texas.

Scientists are also working on ways to sterilize only male flies to make the program even more effective.

Texas officials encouraged ranchers to keep a close eye on their herds and local wildlife. There's now a 24-hour screwworm hotline and a website and map for reported cases.

“This is a highly treatable condition if you act on it immediately,” Republican Gov. Greg Abbott said.

However, Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller — who lost the recent Republican primary to a candidate backed by Abbott — said the federal response will take too long and risks crippling the cattle industry.

Instead, he says a poison bait could eliminate the screwworm problem in a few months, even if the USDA and other experts say the bait hasn’t been proven effective and could poison other flies, animals and even humans.

“What the hell is a good fly?” Miller said in an interview.

This story has been updated to reflect that the USDA revised the dog screwworm case to New Mexico, not Texas as the agency initially reported, and to correct the spelling of Kerrville.

Associated Press writers Susan Montoya Bryan in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Scott McFetridge in Des Moines, Iowa, contributed to this report.

Signage is seen as U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins holds a news conference at the Knipling-Bushland U.S. Livestock Insects Research Laboratory in Kerrville, Texas, Monday, June 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, center, holds a news conference with ranchers, researchers and officials at the Knipling-Bushland U.S. Livestock Insects Research Laboratory in Kerrville, Texas, Monday, June 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

A ranchers arrivse for a news conference with U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins at the Knipling-Bushland U.S. Livestock Insects Research Laboratory in Kerrville, Texas, Monday, June 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

FILE - A test container of dyed fly pupae are displayed at a Domestic New World Screwworm Sterile Fly Production Facility to combat the northward spread of NWS and protect American livestock, in Edinburg, Texas, Feb. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Eric Gay, File)

FILE - An adult New World screwworm fly sits in this undated photo. (Denise Bonilla/U.S. Department of Agriculture via AP)