Renting your fashionable clothing has long been thought as a more environmentally friendly alternative to fast fashion.

However, new research has actually revealed that renting out clothes, long promoted as one of the “solutions” to the current crisis that fast fashion has environment is worse for the world than the current wear once and throw away problem.

The research,, released by the Finnish journal Environmental Research Letters assessed the ecological impact of five different means of owning as well as disposing of clothes, including renting, resale and recycling.

It discovered that renting fashion items had the greatest climate impact of all. The surprise ecological cost was found to be delivery and packaging costs. Renting out entails a large amount of transport, taking the garments backward and forward between the storage facility as well as the occupant. Dry cleaning is also horrible to the environment