Using waste in good taste

Photo Provided By Reclothing Bank

Corporate responsibility

In 2013, Swedish retail clothing giant H&M became the world's first big fashion company to launch a global clothes recycling program, called the Garment Collecting Initiative. The brand, which has been rapidly expanding its operations in China, allows customers to donate their unwanted clothing at any of its stores around the world.

"Any pieces of clothing, regardless of its brand and the condition it's in, are accepted. In return, the customer will receive a voucher for each bag of clothing brought in," says Magnus Olsson, country manager of H&M Greater China.

Last year, H&M launched its first batch of "close the loop" fashion products, which are made from recycled clothing. The company is also aiming to increase the production of such clothing by 300 percent by the end of this year.

According to a research report on textile recycling by the China National Textile and Apparel Council, such closed-loop products can help reduce the environmental impact of garment wastage and effectively cut resource consumption.

H&M's garment collection program had amassed more than 13,000 tons of textiles worldwide last ear, double the amount in the previous year and equivalent to the weight of about 65 million new T-shirts. By July 14, H&M China had collected more than 870 tons of textiles in the Chinese mainland.

Effective recycling

While 95 percent of discarded garments can be re-worn or recycled, only a small portion of these is being repurposed, illustrating that much more needs to be done to address the issue. Tapping into an increasing awareness of this problem, a number of young Chinese entrepreneurs have entered the fray with clothes recycling businesses.

Li Bowen is one such entrepreneur, and he has been working on his recycling business for nearly two years. Since he set up his company in March last year, Li and his colleagues have collected 20 tons of clothes from communities in Changning district of Shanghai.

The 24-year-old hopes to expand his business to more Shanghai districts in the coming years and plans to offer tailor-made services to refashion used clothes.

"I want to offer a service that redesigns used clothes for customers so these garments get a second lease of life," he says.

While coming forward with unwanted garments for recycling is a good thing to do, Hu Kaishen, the founder of Futian Environmental Protection Educator, has urged people to be considerate and exercise some responsibility by donating only the specific clothing required by respective collectors.

Hu's organization, which helps provide winter clothing for 5,000 adults and 5,000 children in Yushu, Qinghai province, every year, says that a lot of donations are summer clothing and are "useless for people living in the grasslands".

Clothes must be sanitized before they are donated or they could end up as waste instead, he says. "All donated clothes should be 100 percent clean - nobody wants to wear a piece of clothing that could have possibly been worn by someone with an infectious disease."

"Used clothes that cannot be recycled properly will just cause further pollution instead of helping the situation. If we're going to do something good, let's at least do it right."