Collect, recirculate and recycle

What are we doing at H&M Group?

Across the H&M Group we are working to increase the rate of textile collection and reuse, improve sorting and recycling technology, as well as working with policy makers to enable the transition to a circular industry.

We are also increasing the amount of recycled fibres used in our products. Find out more about how we work with materials here.

Garment collecting

We were one of the first brands to launch a garment collecting programme in 2013 and since then we have received over 172,700 tonnes of textiles.¹ Customers can drop off their unwanted items in our stores worldwide. We aim to ensure our partners sort them according to their condition, following criteria set out in the EU waste hierarchy, which prioritises reuse before recycling:

• Reuse – garments that can be worn again are sold as second-hand clothes.
• Repurpose & recycle – old clothes and textiles that cannot be resold are repurposed or recycled into new products and fibres.
• Energy recovery – items that do not fit into the above categories are disposed of in other ways prioritising incineration for energy production.

In 2023, 68% of the textiles collecting in our stores were resold, 24% repurposed or recycled and 8% were disposed prioritising incineration to recovery energy.²

At the H&M Group, we are categorically against clothing becoming waste and it goes against our work to circulate products and materials at their highest value. Extended responsibility for products beyond customer use into end of life is important to prevent garments and unwanted textiles ending up in landfill or in markets where there is no or limited recycling infrastructure.

Collecting and recycling in our supply chain

Producing garments and textiles generates fabric offcuts and scraps that are a vital resource, just like all textile waste. Circulating these materials at their highest value can reduce our impact. We have created guidelines to help our suppliers and are building networks of recyclers to recirculate post-industrial/pre-consumer waste in our supply chain supported by the digital platform Reverse Resources.

Systems shift

Products can be designed for circularity, recycling or disassembly, but without adequate infrastructure or the right regulations it can be difficult to recover and recirculate them. We need to increase the rate of textile collection and sorting, develop automatic sorting technology and scale up local textile to textile recycling technology. To make this happen, we need a shift in policy. We have released a position paper on waste as a resource calling for a secondary raw materials market for textiles within the European Union (EU). We believe this can be achieved by:

• Establishing an EU-wide harmonised Extended Producer Responsibility to enable efficient collecting, sorting and recycling across the EU.
• Defining post-consumer textiles as resources.
• Making free movement of textile resources easier globally and within the EU.
• Increasing recycling capacity and standardising sorting, collecting and recycling infrastructure across the EU.

We aim to increase our focus on end-of-life responsibility by continuing to improve operational efficiency, transparency, waste and recycling infrastructure. We will also deepen and further integrate our partnership with our sorting partners, so that together we can work on solutions.