Tags
Earth, Ethical, Fashion, H&M, Land fill, love, New Clothes, Old Clothes, Recycle, Voucher, Waste
Have you ever considered giving your last season’s collections or unwanted clothes to H&M? No I hadn’t either!
I noticed a friend leaving the office laden with clothes bags galore so I asked what she was up to and when she said she was handing them into H&M I had to find out more… and I was impressed. Jess explained that when you give a bag of your old clothes (any brand!) to H&M they in turn give you a £5 voucher to spend in-store.
Obviously the prices in H&M means that their items are mostly disposable and won’t last long but that’s the problem they are targeting and tackling. I hope this opens people’s minds to recycling and mass waste in the UK that we throw out on a daily basis… On average we chuck 7.0 Million tonnes of food per year and each household owns around £4,000 worth of clothes! Imagine that… It certainly doesn’t feel like it. 30% of this won’t have been worth for at least a year. The cost of unused clothing averages around £30 billion and a crazy estimated £140 Million worth (which weighs around 350,000 tonnes) of used clothing goes to landfill! I find these figures depressing, very wasteful and frankly there’s no excuse for it!!
I think we need to revaluate where we put our used clothes from now on… and H&M are doing just that.
‘At H&M, we have set ourselves the challenge of making ultimately making fashion sustainable and sustainability fashionable.’ Karl- Johan Persson, CEO
H&M are thinking ethically with everything they do, and there have been some fantastic changes from field to store making sure that less of our wasted clothing end up in land fill. They are also looking into recycling old to create new, which is a tern called ‘closed loop system’ as well as protecting animals, caring about the water used to make the clothes and chemicals that are involved. H&M also massively support the cotton trade, using three types of cotton sources; recycled, organic and Better Cotton Initiative.
So when you next clear a bin bag of old clothes head straight to an H&M and treat yourself to something new for doing a good deed.
Please note- ‘The Voucher entitles you to £5 off your next purchase at H&M when spending £30 or over’
THE FACTS – H&M’s Conscious Actions Highlights 2014
- Conscious is our plan for creating a better fashion future. It’s built on seven commitments and hundreds of Conscious Actions.
- We collected more than 7,600 tonnes of garments that were no longer wanted. That’s as much fabric as in over 38 million T-shirts.
- Together with Kering, we entered into a partnership with UK-based innovation company Worn Again, which is developing promising technologies for textile to textile recycling.
- Recycled polyester is often made of PET bottles. We used the equivalent of almost 40 million bottles.
- We created more than 16,000 new jobs globally in our stores, offices, and warehouses alone.
- H&M and the H&M Conscious Foundation helped more than 430,000 people gain access to safe drinking water, for example, together with our partner WaterAid.
- We donated over 4 million garments to charitable causes.
Impressive hey… you can read more on the H&M Conscious web page.
All images are H&M new collection.
LOVE TAN