The PULSE - Worth Keeping
The Atacama Desert. We’re all aware of it – a place you can see from space, for reasons none of us want. It’s the linear economy in one image, and the uncomfortable part is that it’s just a system doing exactly what it was designed to do.
OCTober 01, 2026
The PULSE: Worth Keeping
Dr. Lars Kissau, General manager, Samsara Eco
The Atacama Desert. We’re all aware of it – a place you can see from space, for reasons none of us want. It’s the linear economy in one image, and the uncomfortable part is that it’s just a system doing exactly what it was designed to do.
The linear model was never a failure of ethics. It was a rational response to conditions that held for decades. Materials were cheap. Labour was expensive. Disposal was free. Under those three conditions, throwing something away and making a new one seemed sensible.
But all three are changing.
Virgin materials (synthetic and natural) now carry carbon, water and geopolitical costs that weren’t factored into balance sheets.
Regulation is pricing in end of life – ESPR and Digital Product Passports in Europe, stewardship schemes in Australia, EPR from France to California. And recovery technologies are proving it’s possible and worth keeping materials in circulation rather than burying or burning, changing the equation.
Every time a garment is thrown away, everything that went into it goes with it. The oil. The energy. The water. The labour. The chemistry. Years of engineering to make a fibre behave a particular way, and it ends as landfill or as something with a fraction of the value it started with.
Circularity is the answer to that, and in its simplest form it means keeping materials in circulation at their highest possible value. Not their lowest available use. Their highest.
It’s why durability matters so much, and why this magazine has spent pages on it. A garment has to last to be worn again, resold, handed on. And when it genuinely can’t be worn any longer, it should be able to become clothing again. Not something less.
The encouraging thing is the tide is changing. Regulation is pushing for greater material transparency and traceability, conscious consumers are becoming better educated on the role materials play in the clothes they keep, and the technology to keep materials in circulation in their highest possible form is scaling.
The linear model built the textile industry. But it will not sustain it. I hope in ten or twenty years we look back and wonder how we lived with it for so long. That the trade-offs we argue about now – durability against recyclability, performance against sustainability – read as problems we solved rather than problems we accepted. And that places like the Atacama are something we have to describe to people who find them hard to believe.