H&M Group joins Fashion For Good's Sorting For Circularity project

H&M Group, parent company of H&M, & Other Stories and ARKET, has joined innovation platform Fashion for Good's Sorting For Circularity project as a key partner.

In a move demonstrating the "importance of pre-competitive collaboration" H&M Group joins Inditex as key project partners, alongside adidas, BESTSELLER and Zalando who are corporate partners, and Levi Strauss & Co., Otto and PVH Corp. who are participating in a wider working group.

The Sorting For Circularity project was launched by Fashion For Good in May 2020 and aims to create the necessary infrastructure to effectively scale textile recycling, with funding provided by the Laudes Foundation.

The goal of the project is to understand the material composition of textiles, and improve on the current textile sorting system, which relies heavily on manual input and cannot provide accurate insights as clothing labels tend to be unreliable or absent. The ultimate goal of the project is create an open-source platform that will enable textile sorters to match their textile waste with recyclers.

Alongside welcoming H&M Group, Fashion For Good has also announced that it has expanded its regional scope for the project and now includes Spain and Poland in the analysis, both important hubs for recycling with Poland being the third largest exporter of used clothing in Europe.

By including the new locations the project will create a more comprehensive overview of recycling capabilities in different locations and reveal regional differences in the textile waste generated, highlighting the need for innovation, investment and potential policy changes.

Anna-Karin Sundelius, Circular Strategy Lead at H&M Group commented: “To enable the fashion industry to decouple growth from natural resource use, we need to make recycled materials accessible on a bigger scale. Many discarded clothes and textiles are not treated as resources but as waste; this we need to change! Only through industry-wide collaborations and investments in research and innovations can we transform our industry into a circular one.”