The Swedish fashion chain H&M and the waste disposal company Remondis from Lünen have founded a joint venture. With this they want to recycle used and no longer worn clothing.
The waste management company Remondis and the Swedish fashion chain H&M are working together to recycle clothes. The joint venture Looper Textile was founded to collect, sort and sell used and no longer used textiles, said the disposal company from Lünen near Dortmund and the trading group from Stockholm.
60 percent of the textiles that are no longer used in the EU currently end up directly in the garbage and only 40 percent are recycled, said Looper boss Emily Bolon. With the construction of infrastructure and solutions for collection, progress will hopefully be made in terms of the circular economy. The company relies on new sorting technologies.
Greenpeace criticism
Environmentalists generally see it as a positive thing when used textiles are better recycled than before. Viola Wohlgemuth from Greenpeace is still critical of the joint venture – from her point of view, H&M is a fast fashion company that is wasting important resources with its business model of fast-moving clothes. “The core of the joint venture is not about sustainability, but about securing textile material flows that are becoming more valuable.”
Wohlgemuth referred to an EU strategy that is intended to promote the use of recycled fibers – the demand for them will therefore increase, from which H&M and Remondis want to benefit with the joint venture. The environmentalist calls for textiles to only be manufactured in such a way that they can be recycled with existing technology and not burned in waste incineration plants or exported as waste as has been the case up to now. “H&M and the whole fast fashion industry urgently need to change for this.”
Source: Stern
