In the most hierarchical showcase for the Argentine business community –the Colloquio de Idea that has just closed its 57th edition–, Martín Llaryora insisted –among other issues– on his commitment to promoting the circular economy.

“The linear production model is gone. It is not sustainable in environmental or social matters”, said the mayor of the city of Córdoba before citing the world summit on the subject that he organized in August and the creation in the provincial capital of the first Circular Economy cluster in the country.

The municipality thus endorses an agenda that advances locally and globally and that urgently needs to be accelerated: the adoption of a model of production and consumption that is concerned and deals with its impacts, that recycles, reuses, renews and repairs goods and materials, thus closing the circle.

On that path, the to-do list for public and private activity is huge. The Municipality itself has challenges such as drastically reducing the burial of garbage. Large companies and SMEs are also challenged to redraw their business models in a circle, a trend that slowly but steadily generates very positive cases in the province.

However, apart from the state promotion systems and private financing –almost in silence–, a form of circular economy is growing steadily in the city which, with the pandemic and the deepening of the economic crisis, accelerated conspicuously.

It deals with the sale of used products, with clothing as emblematic merchandise.

Clothing, shoes and accessories are goods that most of us consume at a rate that does not come from their use or wear value, but from symbolic factors worked from marketing: fashion trends, collections, anniversaries, rituals and the rest.

That frantic pace of buying and discarding made the textile industry the second most polluting on the planet, according to UN monitoring. And it opened in it the territory on which the second-hand buying and selling circuit grows, which today is escalating to unprecedented proportions.

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— telepathy supremacist⁷ Tue Aug 27 00:00:51 +0000 2019

One of its initial fuels, both here and abroad, has been the advancement of environmental awareness in the new generations.

The pandemic, for its part, injected gasoline into the boom, by pouring more people into the circuit who needed to generate new income.

This is especially palpable in the chapter that this business has in the popular economy. In the fifty street fairs that the municipality detected in this city, used clothing is among the most sold.

The premium version of this circuit is deployed in middle-class and affluent neighborhoods of the city, where well-assembled showrooms and second-hand clothing stores are no longer a rarity.

Franchises, an invention from Córdoba

The third structural boost to the secondhand circuit comes from technology, which activated new spaces for connecting supply and demand. On social networks such as WhatsApp, Facebook (its marketplace) or Instagram, thousands of occasional sellers of used goods mix with entrepreneurs who make a business out of the activity.

With even greater vision, e-commerce platforms are growing, such as the one created by Stefanía Kessel from Cordoba: Baby Back allows more than 400 mothers to buy and sell second-hand children's clothing and good brands.

In developed countries, the sustained expansion of the second-hand fashion market has already generated large digital companies listed on the Stock Exchange and forced the main retail chains to develop the second-hand circuit. Ikea, H&M and Adidas are examples in a growing list.

In the United States, where it is estimated that the clothing resale business will multiply 11-fold between 2021 and 2025 –by then it will move 77 billion dollars–, the ThredUp platform is another impact case to follow.

Córdoba is not far behind in creativity. Take, for example, the chain of used clothing stores (“Pre-amada”, in her jargon) that the entrepreneur Laura Posada started in 2018: today it has three branches and has just made a point of franchising the proposal. He has already opened the first mouth under this format in San Luis and wants to add between three and four per year. What is called a "round business".