Business Model environmental performance in footwear retail: a BM-LCA comparison of linear and secondhand sales

Övrigt konferensbidrag, 2026

Footwear markets operate at very large scale. Industry statistics indicate that global output reached 23.9 billion pairs in 2024 (APICCAPS, 2025), equivalent to roughly three pairs per person and year. Life-cycle carbon emissions for a pair of shoes are typically in the tens of kilograms CO₂e per pair, with published estimates varying by footwear type and system boundary (Cheah et al., 2013; Zhang et al., 2025). Taken together, these figures imply an order-of-magnitude carbon footprint for footwear of hundreds of billions of kg CO₂e annually, which then amounts to around half a percent of global CO₂ emissions (Friedlingstein et al., 2024).
Addressing such impacts requires changes not only in products and technologies, but also in the business models that shape value creation, delivery, and capture across supply chains. Sustainable business models (SBMs) are often defined as business models that create economic value while simultaneously generating ecological and social value for a broader set of stakeholders (Lüdeke-Freund et al., 2018). Secondhand resale can be conceptualised as a circular SBM centred on product life extension through reuse (Bocken et al., 2016; Lüdeke-Freund, Gold and Bocken, 2019). The secondhand fashion market has seen increased interest from both consumers and companies (Persson and Hinton, 2023). The literature on SBMs in general and secondhand in particular appears limited in a footwear context. Yet, footwear sustainability is well covered at product level, through life cycle assessment (LCA) (Van Rensburg, Nkomo and Mkhize, 2020).
Environmental evidence suggests reuse of clothing (enabled by i.e. secondhand business models) can reduce impacts when it displaces primary production (Farrant, Olsen and Wangel, 2010). However, this potential depends strongly on displacement rates and additional burdens from collection, sorting, cleaning, and transport; more broadly, rebound effects can occur if reuse expands total consumption rather than substituting for new purchases (Farrant, Olsen and Wangel, 2010; Sandin and Peters, 2018; Zink and Geyer, 2017).
Böckin et al. (2022) contend that approaches for measuring and managing environmental outcomes of business model choices remain underdeveloped, and assessments frequently remain at the product level even when the ambition is to evaluate business model performance. Business Model Life Cycle Assessment (BM-LCA) was developed to fill this gap (Böckin et al., 2022). BM-LCA extends conventional LCA such that the business model becomes the unit of analysis, rather than the product. The method is used to quantify the environmental impacts caused by a business model relative to its economic performance (typically a set profit level). This enables environmental comparison of business models that are equal in terms of profitability. By linking monetary flows in the business model to the physical flows of the associated product system, it is possible to analyse the dependence of the BM-LCA result (i.e., kg CO₂e/€ profit) on various technical, physical and economic parameters (Goffetti et al., 2022).
This ongoing case study compares the environmental (climate change) performance of a major Swedish shoe retailer’s regular linear sales business model with its retailer-operated secondhand sales model, by applying BM-LCA. The objective is to answer the following research questions.
RQ1) Does the secondhand model render a lower climate change impact in comparison to the linear sales business model?
RQ2) Which technical and economic parameters are most important for the environmental performance of the secondhand and linear business model?
RQ3) How can the business models’ effect on the greater footwear production-consumption system’s climate impact be assessed?