14 DAY TRIAL // Regardless of whether or not you are a fashion enthusiast, chances are you’ve at least heard of H&M. The name Kering, on the other hand, doesn’t get mentioned all than often.
Still, the brands this other company owns, i.e. Puma, Gucci, Balenciaga, Alexander McQueen, and many others equally prestigious, are fairly popular.
Earlier this week, the two clothing giants announced a partnership with Worn Again, a start-up based in London, UK. The goal of this collaboration: put Worn Again’s newly developed clothes recycling technology to the test.
How does one recycle clothes?
The technology developed by Worn Again makes it possible to recover fibers from clothes and rid them of whatever dyes they were treated with to make them all nice and pretty when they were first used to create the perfect outfit.
Once recovered, the fibers can be used to make new clothes. That’s right, we’re basically talking about making new clothes from the disintegrated remains of old ones. Kind of like tearing apart a car made of Lego parts and then using these parts to make, say, an airplane.
Well, except for the fact that the parts are infinitesimal and, consequently, way more difficult to manipulate and coax into taking a new shape. It’s all pretty impressive if you think about it, especially since we rarely consider the science behind our outfits.
The textile-to-textile chemical recycling technology developed by H&M’s and Kering’s latest partner, the London-based start-up Worn Again, is designed to recover both polyester and cotton fibers from clothes that have reached the end of their life and can no longer be used.
By the looks of it, it’s the first recycling technology that can achieve this, so it shouldn’t come as such a big surprise that H&M and Kering proved so eager to team up with Worn Again and turn our world topsy-turvy simply by showing us that old socks can be made into new ones.
“Worn Again’s textile-to-textile chemical recycling technology is the first of its kind able to separate and extract polyester and cotton from old or end-of-use clothing and textiles,” H&M and Kering explain in a joint statement.
“Once separated, the aim is for this unique process to enable the ‘recaptured’ polyester and cellulose from cotton to be spun into new fabric creating a ‘circular resource model’ for textiles,” the clothing giants further detail.
Why recycling clothes is a great idea
We might have different tastes in music, like different foods, and love and adore completely opposite movie genres, but the fact of the matter is that we all wear clothes. And we don’t make them ourselves, we buy them. That is, we pay others to make them for us.
The thing is that, like all the things we need in our day to day life - think electricity, phones, even food - clothes require resources. Otherwise put, there’s a greater cost to our favorite outfits than just what we see on the price tag.
The bigger our wardrobe, the greater the environmental costs that come with our being fashionable and looking good. This might not be such a problem if it were not for the fact that, these days, the planet isn’t doing all that great as it is.
For this very simple reason, we should all be glad that H&M and Kering have both agreed to get to recycle clothes. They’re not asking us to change our shopping habits, they’re changing the way they make clothes so that we can enjoy greener outfits without having to lift a finger.
As explained by Anna Gedda with H&M, “In the long run this can change the way fashion is made and massively reduce the need for extracting virgin resources from our planet. Furthermore, it brings us closer to our goal of creating fashion in a circular model.”
Hopefully, other clothing companies will soon get behind this trend as well. With climate change and global warming steadily spiraling out of control, we could sure use a more eco-friendly fashion industry.