Rent your clothes instead of buying them to help save the Environment. Sound a bit wacky? Well, it’s the latest advice from the UK Government’s waste watchdog.

The Waste and Resource Action Programme (Wrap) have said that ending the current obsession with owning material goods could help reduce waste and greenhouse gas emissions.

The idea is this: rather than buying expensive clothes and accessories that are only used a couple of times before being thrown away, people should hire expensive items such as shoes, dresses and suits instead.

This green idea doesn’t just extend to clothes either – Wrap believe that instead of buying high-end electronics such as plasma TVs, games consoles and TVs which often get replaced every few years as new technology and gadgets are brought out, we should revert back to the 1960s style rental shops and rent all our electronic equipment instead of buying.

By switching away from buying expensive items to renting them, this is supposed to help stop perfectly good items from being thrown away whilst they are still able to be used. This will then help stop unnecessary manufacturing and this in turn will help reduce greenhouse gas emissions thus helping the UK meet climate change targets.

As well as helping the environment, this idea would have the positive side effects of saving money – no need to buy expensive items that you will only use once when hiring the item for the occasion will be much cheaper – and also helping stop your house being cluttered up.

If everyone in the UK started to rent high end items instead of buying them, it is anticipated that a fifth of spending on new goods would be converted to renting; Better use of resources could then deliver around 1- percent of the CO2 reduction that UK is aiming for by 2020, a saving of around 13 million tonnes of CO2 per year.

Wrap denies that the move would harm the UK’s employment figures as most of the UK’s goods are made overseas anyway and any job losses in the manufacturing industry would be balanced out by new jobs created in the rental industry.

The watchdog are also calling for people to modify their diet to help the climate. By reducing the amount of dairy and meat products that households eat, this small change would reduce the amount of carbon emissions from livestock and therefore help stop climate change.

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