clothing

Cleaning the Clothing Industry

In retail stores of the global fast-fashion brand H&M, customers can bring in their no-longer-trendy or otherwise unwanted clothes and get a discount on new purchases. The chain has collected more than 30,000 metric tons of garments since 2013.

The goal of the H&M program is to prevent used clothes from going to landfills and incinerators and instead give them new life in second hand stores, as cleaning rags, or as fiber material in insulation products.

But H&M has bigger plans. It hopes to use end-of-life clothes as raw material for making new fashions.

June 27, 2016 | Source: C&EN | by Melody M. Bomgardner

In retail stores of the global fast-fashion brand H&M, customers can bring in their no-longer-trendy or otherwise unwanted clothes and get a discount on new purchases. The chain has collected more than 30,000 metric tons of garments since 2013.

The goal of the H&M program is to prevent used clothes from going to landfills and incinerators and instead give them new life in second hand stores, as cleaning rags, or as fiber material in insulation products.

But H&M has bigger plans. It hopes to use end-of-life clothes as raw material for making new fashions.

By analyzing the environmental life cycle of clothes manufacturing, brands such as H&M and Levi’s have learned that a large proportion of the water use and carbon emissions associated with their industry happens during the production of fibers such as cotton and polyester.

“We want to find a solution for reusing and recycling all textile fiber for new use,” says H&M spokesperson Ulrica Bogh-Lind. “This can change the way fashion is made and massively reduce the need for extracting virgin resources from our planet.”

Achieving this so-called circular economy goal is many years off and will require significant technological innovation, Bogh-Lind concedes. “New technical solutions are important for our ambition to close the loop.”

But industry critics argue that these long-term ambitions obscure environmental shortcomings in the ways apparel is produced today at contract manufacturing sites around the world. They would like to see sustainability efforts focus on areas where impacts are big and immediate—even if the solutions aren’t as stylish as designing a line of eco-friendly clothing.

The apparel industry has been on a years-long odyssey to account for its impact on the environment. This year H&M published its 14th annual sustainability report. Yet companies often learn about poor pollution controls at far-flung manufacturing sites at the same time as government agencies, investors, environmental organizations, and customers.