H&M closes the loop on denim
High street fashion brand H&M is taking steps to ‘close the loop’ on its products worldwide by introducing 16 new denim styles using recycled cotton from textiles collected in stores.
The Swedish company’s Garment Collection Initiative, which has been running since 2013, allows customers to bring unwanted clothes from any brand into stores for recycling. To date, over 18,000 tonnes of used clothes have been collected globally through the initiative. Now, these unwanted garments have been turned into something more desirable.
From September, shoppers will be able to purchase the new denim styles for men, women and children, ranging from jeans to shirts and hoodies, made using cotton collected through the scheme.
The brand says that currently it is able to use 20 per cent recycled cotton from collected clothes, but that it is investing in new technology that will enable it to ‘increase this share without losing quality’.
It has set a target of increasing the number of garments made with at least 20 per cent recycled fabric by 300 per cent compared to 2014.
H&M’s 2014 Sustainability Report claims that the brand used the equivalent of almost 40 million PET bottles in its recycled polyester during the year and increased its share of sustainable material use to 14 per cent, compared to 11 per cent in 2013.
The company also launched its Conscious Denim collection in 2014, which it claims uses 56 per cent less water and 58 less energy than ‘comparable denim’.
Karl-Johan Persson, CEO of H&M, commented: “Creating a closed loop for textiles, in which unwanted clothes can be recycled into new ones, will not only minimise textile waste, but also significantly reduce the need for virgin resources as well as other impacts fashion has on our planet.“
Sustainable fashion in the limelight
The issue of sustainable fashion has been studied by the Waste & Resources Action Programme (WRAP) recently.
It has found that by extending a product’s active life by just nine months could reduce the carbon, waste and waste footprints by 20-30 per cent each.
In a 2012 report, ‘Valuing Our Clothes – The true cost of how we design use and dispose of clothes in the UK’, the programme found that of the million tonnes of clothes supplied on the UK market each year a third ‘end up in landfill when they’re finished with’ and that ‘around £30 billion-worth of clothes are unused in people’s wardrobes’.
In October 2014, WRAP held its inaugural Extending the Life of Clothes Design Award, which challenged designers to address key reasons for garment failure and ensure longer life times.
The award was won by Rhiannon Hunt, who created a range of adjustable and attachable features to alter clothing in order to enable the owner to adjust size, style and length of the garment themselves.
Earlier this month, a communal working space for fashion and textiles professionals opened in the Edinburgh Ocean Terminal shopping centre.
Run by textiles agency Kalopsia and supported by Zero Waste Scotland, The Facility, seeks to help producers make the most of supplies and share sustainable practices.
