New Sustainability Effort of H&M Will Turn Your Old Clothes to New Ones

H&M has installed Looop at its store in Stockholm’s Drottninggatan shopping district

The fashion industry has struggled to find a way to turn old clothes into new ones for years. Finally, H&M has developed a solution that will help transform clothes for good to promote sustainability. If this tech is widely adopted, it will make recycling clothes as easy as recycling aluminium cans or cardboard boxes.

 

H&M has installed a machine called Looop at its store in Stockholm’s Drottninggatan shopping district. A customer can bring in any garment that they want to discard like an old t-shirt or a cotton dress and see it broken down and then rewoven into a scarf, a sweater or even a baby blanket. The process can be seen via the glass walls of the machine and can take up to 5 hours. You just need to pay USD 15 (about AUD 20.86) for the finished item.

 

H&M’s Head of Sustainability, Pascal Brun said that this machine was installed not to recycle the garments at an industrial scale but to show people how fabric recycling works so that they can bring in their old clothes too. The program will begin this Monday, so if anyone is in Stockholm, they can start finding their old clothes.

 

The recycling process can handle more than one garment at a time does not use chemicals or water while shredding old clothes and creating new ones. It might, however, use sustainably sourced raw materials, the amount of which would be kept as low as possible.

 

H&M LOOOP

 

H&M stated that the system is available only in Sweden as of now and didn’t share details of the plans to expand Looop in the future. We think that the system might help enhance awareness about recycling and clothing waste, which is high in the fast-fashion world of today, it doesn’t have the scale needed to make an impact on the volume of clothing waste that is generated annually.

 

H&M might want to partner with another sustainability-oriented brand to use Looop at a larger scale in the future. It might be the recycling revolution of the future.