Discarded cans, plastic bottles, car tyres, fire brigade hoses, TV’s, fake suede car seats. The fashion industry has been able to recycle lots of unlikely products into new must-haves. In many cases, those bags, belts or shoes don’t even look like they were made from waste materials.
What’s more, with rising cotton prices, an increasing number of mainstream brands and discounters (including Puma and H&M) have come to opt for recycled fabrics, such as recycled cotton and recycled polyester. Those are not bad options for the environment, as the re-use of textile waste reduces the need for new fiber production and decreases the use of energy resources. For this reason, the Made-By environmental benchmark on fibers favors materials such as recycled nylon, recycled polyester, recycled cotton and recycled wool alongside sustainable materials such as biocotton, lyocell, organic linen and organic hemp.
Recently, even fashion retailers have come to embrace recycling. Marks & Spencer proclaimed shwopping to be the new shopping. The retailer encourages its customers to donate an old item of clothing to charity every time they come into the store to buy something new. M&S works together with Oxfam to resell, reuse or recycle these donations. The retailer aims to develop a closed loop system that reduces textile waste to a minimum. That would certainly be no luxury as every year, approximately 1 billion clothes in the UK end up as landfill.
Are other retailers likely to follow into the footsteps of the M&S shwopping initiative? Perhaps the introduction of the Swop-box will persuade them to do so. This recycling bin, designed especially for fashion stores, enables consumers to hand in their old clothes in exchange for a discount coupon for a new purchase.
And there are other recycling initiatives in the retail sector. In 2012, Puma claimed to have opened the first sustainable store on earth. The Bangalore shop has been furnished with recycled wood. The building uses recycled steel from old electronics, bicycles, and tiffin boxes, along with porotherm blocks made using waste from the annual desilting of the lakes in Kunigal.