H&M is hoping for a breakthrough in textile recycling.
While it’s currently possible to mechanically recycle single fiber fabrics such as denim jeans and wool sweaters, a lot of garments are made from a blend of different fibers. A pair of women’s jeans might be made from a blend comprising 94 per cent cotton, five per cent polyester and one per cent elastane.
When these garments reach the end of their lives, they usually end up discarded in landfills or down cycled into low-value applications like insulation or carpeting.
H&M is trying to develop the required technology to recycle blended textiles into new fabrics and yarns. The aim is to create at least one ready technology to recycle clothes made from textile blends into new clothes. This would be a major breakthrough in the journey towards a closed loop for textiles in the fashion industry.
The Swedish retailer has for long been committed to collecting used clothes in stores in an effort to keep them out of landfills and give them a second life.
More than 12,000 tons of garments were collected in H&M stores in 2015—that’s as much fabric as in more than 60 million T-shirts—and more than one million products introduced last year were made with at least 20 per cent recycled material from collected garments.
