It does not even matter what brand they are, the company says

Dec 7, 2012 09:25 GMT  ·  By

Starting February 2013, quite a lot of ladies and gentlemen might want to take a few minutes (or perhaps hours, or maybe even days, in some cases) to sort through their closets and decide which clothing items they no longer plan on wearing.

This is because H&M has recently made it public news that it is to launch a new recycling program for textile fibers.

To cut a long story short, all H&M stores in the chain's 48 markets worldwide are to start accepting their customers’ old and ragged clothes as donations. Each bag of used garments will get its former owner a voucher.

Interestingly enough, the company does not even care what brand the clothes people bring to their stores are.

Thus, the company is to make no discriminations between garments and accept whatever the customers are willing to offer it.

“Through the global initiative H&M’s customers can save natural resources and contribute to reduced environmental impact by avoiding textile waste,” reads the official press release on this matter.

Furthermore, “In return, the customer will receive a voucher for each bag brought. The collected clothes are then handled by H&M’s partner, I:Collect, which provides the infrastructure in which consumer goods are repeatedly reprocessed and made available for new use.”

As the company explains, its decision to become the first to ever launch such a global-scale recycling campaign stems from the fact that, as several studies have shown, tonnes of clothing items end up in landfills on a yearly basis, despite their being re-usable.

By collecting these garments and finding new uses for them, H&M hopes to cut down on the ecological footprint of the clothing industry, and educate people with respect to social and environmental responsibly.

The company's CEO, Karl-Johan Persson, made a case of how, “Our sustainability efforts are rooted in a dedication to social and environmental responsibility.”

“We want to do good for the environment, which is why we are now offering our customers a convenient solution: to be able to leave their worn out or defective garments with H&M.”