Where Did The Old Clothes Donated To H&M Go In The End?

Wu Shuang often takes the old clothes he no longer wears to the H&M store in Nanjing West Road, Shanghai. She is not an environmentalist, nor does she believe in "breaking away from home". On the contrary, she is a frequent visitor to this fast fashion brand. She donated the old clothes to H&M for recycling. The reason is that she wants to get the coupons. But she sometimes wondered, where did the clothes that had been poured into the recycle bin go? Fashion is one of the most polluted industries on the planet. At least 10% of the world's carbon emissions and 20% of industrial water pollution are caused by the fashion industry. Fast fashion is often regarded as the most unfriendly part of the environment, and its impact on climate change is bigger than that of sea and air travel. However, fast fashion has also brought great wealth: in the past 30 years, the fashion industry has grown from $500 billion to $2 trillion and 400 billion a year, which is due to the rapid consumption of low-cost fashion products by consumers. According to Forbes, more than half of the fast fashion products are abandoned by consumers in the year after the purchase. Many times, these products are often thrown into landfills. In fact, 95% of textiles thrown away by people are actually recyclable.

But H&M has long wanted to change that. According to Pascal Brun, director of brand sustainability, as early as the topic of sustainability is becoming a hot topic in the market today, its brand and parent company Haines H&M group (H&M Group) have all taken into account. H&M is the world's first fashion company to implement the old clothes recycling scheme. In the spring of 2013, the brand has implemented the old clothes recycling plan in all markets. After entering every new market, the brand will implement the old clothes recycling plan in the first year.

H&M's desire is strong, but it means that the number of old clothes donated by consumers in the 74 markets is quite alarming. To do this, first of all, the brand needs to have a complete set of strategies to ensure that the old clothes can be fully reused. Secondly, H&M needs to find a proven solution partner to help them achieve this. Finally, H&M needs to spread their environmental initiatives and transparency to consumers again, and further encourage them to choose more environmentally friendly ones. Shopping and acting.

Brun said: sustainability is a very complex concept, which requires systematic transformation of the whole market system from design, production to operation and even consumption end, thus forming a circular economy mode rather than a traditional linear economic model criticized. The vision of Haines and Maurice group is to lead the fashion industry to a closed cycle and a renewable mode and become a fair and equal company. Therefore, the group releases sustainability reports every year and designs a very challenging KPI: the group hopes that by 2030, 100% will use recycled or other sustainable sources - in addition to finding environmentally transparent suppliers, the old clothes recycling will also provide support for this. The group set up a target of reaching 25000 tons per year in 2020. This goal has been completed ahead of schedule. According to the "2019 sustainable development performance report" released by Haines and Maurice group yesterday, it collected 29005 tons of old clothes in the past year, an increase of 40% over the previous year. According to the data provided, in China, from 2013 to January 2019, more than 2525 tons of textiles were recovered in the Chinese market.

In the store, Wu Shuang's old clothes will be put into a recycling bin, jointly set up by I:Collect (I:CO) Company and H&M. It is one of the subsidiaries of SOEX, a German textile collection and recycling group, responsible for managing H&M's old clothes collected around the world. I:CO has branches in the United Kingdom, Japan and the United States, and the main event is Wolfein, a two hour drive south of Berlin, Germany. Here, I:CO operates a recycling factory with 13 football fields. Every day, there are about 25 to 30 trucks, which carry over 1000 tons of old clothes in the recycling bin of thousands of shops, averaging more than 14 tons per day.

Although the number of old clothes sounds a lot, the proportion of clothes that people throw away in rubbish heaps is still very small, I:CO official said. In order to ensure the best use of materials and achieve "zero waste", the initial inspection and subdivision of each garment need to be completed manually, so about 700 employees are hired, and each person shifts every eight hours to classify the old clothes according to the best use.

In factories, the snake skin bags are used to carry clothes, tilting down. According to 400 different standards, workers can directly use the naked eye and touch to distinguish the degree of reuse of clothes, and quickly throw them into separate basket frames, and then send them to the next finishing section. During the initial inspection stage, the workers may be able to "save" 60% of the clothes that can still be worn, which will be kept and sold according to the quality, such as donations to charity, secondhand antique clothing for sale or for international exports. Please note that these old clothes will not be sold directly in H&M stores.

About 40% of textiles can not be worn repeatedly, and some absorbent fabrics will be chopped, decomposed and repackaged. They will be converted into products such as cleaning cloth and so on. Other textiles will enter another link. The fibers will be broken up and reconstructed again, and will be transformed into textile fibers through recycling. Or they can be used in the automotive industry to manufacture damping and insulating materials. Metal buttons, zippers and other accessories that can not be digested in these processes will be automatically collected and transferred from I:CO to other corresponding recycling enterprises. And those clothes that can not be re worn, recycled or recycled can be used to produce energy. In order to make full use of every link, factories that are full of rumbling sound will collect dust from production and press them into blocks of brick and sell them to the paper industry.

In the form of recycling, recycling and recycling, a complete closed loop of old clothes recycling has been carried out, which is a good model for the fast fashion industry of mass production. Because H&M itself is exploring new recycling business models, and launches different attempts such as on-demand, customization, repair, fashion leasing, antique clothing sales. Every year, H&M will also launch a series of environmental conscious action limits to drive its development and innovation in environmentally friendly recycled fabrics in the direction of high-end fashion styles. Not all consumers understand this and pay for it. When McKinsey and BoF jointly conducted research, although many people expressed interest in sustainable fashion, only a few people still willing to pay for sustainable products. Among them, the Z generation is only 31%, and the baby boomer generation is only 12%. In China, H&M may spend more energy.

Wu Shuang: she pays more attention to style and price, and does not pay special attention to products labeled with sustainable labels. She also said that many other "Auntie" customers saw her "donate" their old clothes to H&M, and asked curiously, "they will not just wash them and put them in the store, will they sell them?"

"Is it possible to communicate with consumers from convenience and discount incentives to a good entry point?" Wu Shuang said: because she had tried to donate old clothes to poor areas or to sell them on idle fish, she still felt very cumbersome, and the cost of time and communication was too high. In the process of recycling, H&M does not check the quality of old clothes, nor does it limit the number of brands and donations donated. Instead, it encourages her "unconsciously" environmental behavior to do better.

H&M Pascal Brun, a sustainable responsible person, said the brand is constantly strengthening training and communication: "if we do not explain why we do so, we can not expect our customers to have different behaviors. Therefore, I think we must better explain why we do these things and explain what we have done. " In addition to more obvious information guidance and environmental stories in websites and stores, H&M will focus on training its shop assistants. "We also need to appear in social media, tell our stories, and be more sincere and transparent," he said. In addition to H&M, Uniqlo and Zara have launched the old clothes recycling program. In a sense, fast fashion will have a great impact once its scale is large, its retail outlets are large, and the scope of its customers is wide.

"Obviously, when you have scale and influence, you have responsibilities," Brun said. As the largest user of the world's sustainable cotton and man-made fiber materials, H&M will bring raw materials into the recycling mode and will also benefit its own business. "So the only sustainable development mode is recycling," Brun added.

Can such measures really change the environment? Dana Thomas, the famous fashion journalist, "the fashion giant: the price of fast fashion and the future of clothes", said in an interview with former media: "we have to wait and see what happens." She pointed out that the goal of fashion industry should be zero waste, and "H&M is trying to do this well, and I applaud".

"I hope that the fashion industry can be like the food movement. We have not abandoned fast food, but the organic movement has developed, and organic food has become more democratic and cheaper. Now, fast food restaurants like McDonald's also sell salads. If we can make H&M and Zara provide something similar to salad, then we will get a lot better shape, "Thomas said.