The clothing retailer, H&M, has been offering a garment recycling service across all its stores since 2013. This eco-friendly initiative accepts all textile clothing, regardless of the type or condition. Whether you have old jeans, sweaters, shirts, dresses, or even an old baseball jersey that you no longer need, H&M will happily recycle them.
For every supermarket-sized bag of unwanted textiles or clothing, including items like old school uniforms, you bring into the store, H&M will reward you with a £5 voucher. This voucher can be used either in-store or on the retailer’s website to make any purchase over £25.
It's a great way to get rid of clothing that may well normally go into landfill, and means that your old clothes will get a new lease of life. Over 10% of a garment’s total impact on the climate happens after you’ve left the store. Things like how often you wash your clothes or if you toss them in the rubbish instead of recycling, have an effect.
So, how you take care of them really matters! Learn how you can make your clothes last longer with H&M's Take Care concept, available in all online stores.
Don’t want it? Recycle.
H&M's have recycling boxes in our stores across the globe. The scheme works like this:
1. Take any unwanted clothes or textiles, by any brand and in any condition, to one of our stores.
2. Hand in your bag of old clothes at the cash desk and receive a thank you voucher to use towards your next purchase.
Once you’ve dropped off your previously loved fashion in one of H&M's garment collecting boxes, their business partner takes over. They empty the boxes and sort the contents into three categories:
Rewear: Wearable clothes are marketed as second-hand clothing.
Reuse: If the clothes or textiles are not suitable for rewear they’re turned into other products, such as remake collections or cleaning cloths.
Recycle: All other clothes and textiles are shredded into textile fibres and used to make for example insulation materials.
In 2019, H&M Group collected 29,005 tonnes of textiles for reuse and recycling through our garment collecting initiative — equivalent to about 145 million T-shirts!
You can find your local H&M store using the store finder on the H&M website.