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There’s a popular saying in fashion styling circles: most of us wear 20 percent of our clothes 80 percent of the time. So what exactly do you do with those bits that just clutter up cupboard space – things that are outdated, ill-fitting or have slowly descended into the bore-you-senseless zone.
You could sell them on eBay or High End, hawk them at a market or donate them to charity or women’s shelter. But what if you’ve literally loved them to death? As in, completely thread bare, faded, frayed and embarrassingly unlikely to be appreciated by anyone else every again?
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High Street clothing giant H&M has a unique solution. In what was likely a bid to address concerns around its own fast (aka disposable) fashion business model, the company launched a worldwide Garment Collection initiative in 2013. Customers can drop off unwanted clothes of any brand or condition – from pristine to practically falling apart – into marked bins at any H&M store.
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Those rejects are then either reused or recycled in a bid to find unloved clothes loving new homes, or at very least pulped and turned into new fabric or even home insulation to reduce the amount ending up in landfill.
Since the initiative began, more than 40,000 tonnes of fabric has been collected – the equivalent fabric to more than 125 million T-shirts. In 2014, the first H&M Close the Loop collection using recycled fibres was launched. Imagine wearing a brand new pair of jeans made from your favourite old ones (blended in with the fibres of a hundred other cool pairs too).
Want to know exactly how it works and where those tired old treasures could end up? Watch this video now.
