Swedish retail giant H&M began a revolutionary practice in February 2013: it started collecting old garment items from its stores worldwide to reuse them to save water and ensure environmental sustainability. To date, the company has collected 28,000 tonnes of old garment items for reuse and recycling, which is as much fabric as in at least 100 million T-shirts, according to company data. “In the short term, we have a clear vision to avoid waste and minimise the waste that goes to landfill. In the long term, we want to find a solution for reusing and recycling all textile fibres for new use,” Anna Eriksson, spokesperson for H&M, told The Daily Star in an interview earlier this week.
In February 2014, H&M launched the first products made of recycled textile fibres from items collected under the Garment Collecting Initiative. The garments, made from recycled cotton, included five classic denim pieces for men and women. It serves as an example of how H&M is closing the loop on textiles and the aim is to use more recycled material in future, Eriksson said. “Our long-term aim is to find a solution for reusing and recycling all textile fibres for new use and to use yarn made out of collected textiles in our products.” The company is currently investing in ‘close the loop’ innovation and are involved in a number of different promising initiatives and projects. For example, along with French luxury-goods maker Kering, H&M has teamed up with UK-based innovation company Worn Again, which is developing technology for textile-to-textile recycling. Once the garments are collected in the stores, they are sent off to the company’s sorting plant, where the items are evaluated against almost 400 different criteria, Eriksson said. The products are classified depending on the quality — re-wear, re-use, recycle and energy. The sorting process is set up to the criteria of the waste hierarchy, which states that all products fit for wear are sorted out to keep them in their original form for as long as possible. In 2015, some 1.3 million pieces were made with ‘close the loop’ material, which was an increase of over 300 percent from 2014. Regarding the prices of the garment items produced from the reused and recycled clothes, Eriksson said they want to move towards a 100 percent circular business model. “That means, nothing less than turning around how our industry has been operating for decades — moving away from a linear production model to one that uses once-created products as a resource for new desirable fashion.” “We see using recycled materials as an investment for the future and garments made of recycled materials are not more expensive in stores,” said Eriksson. H&M purchases apparel worth nearly $5 billion a year from Bangladesh.
