As droughts and floods wreak havoc on crops, cotton has been particularly volatile. The price of cotton has risen 13 percent this year after falling 18 percent in 2012. H&M doesn’t disclose the share of its costs that are represented by cotton.
“One of the major challenges is the limited resources on our planet,” H&M’s Chief Executive Officer Karl-Johan Persson said at a Stockholm conference. “This global clothing collecting initiative feels great.”
To grow enough conventional cotton to create a plain T-shirt requires as much as 15 bathtubs of water, according to H&M. The retailer, which sells T-shirts for $5.95, is the world’s biggest user of organic cotton, according to Textile Exchange. The company says it expects to get all its cotton from more sustainable resources, such as organic and recycled cotton, by 2020, up from 11.4 percent last year.
A hitch in turning last year’s magenta leggings into 2014’s “it” jacket is a lack of cost-effective recycling technology and the limited responsibility that producers have for used garments.
Textile recycling lags far behind paper. In Sweden, a country so good at recycling it imports trash to fuel heat and power plants, more than half of the 33 pounds of clothing and home textiles every person uses a year is thrown away, according to Sweden’s Environmental Protection Agency.
“We need to be able to do this very cheaply,” said Gunnar Henriksson, a professor in wood chemistry at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm who has invented a new method for regenerating textile fibers, which he says could lead to better textile recycling. “If this could cost an unlimited amount, this wouldn’t be that difficult.”
H&M is investing the bulk of the proceeds it gets from selling garments to I:Collect in research on recycling textile fibers, though it declined to reveal the value of those investments. While some new recycling techniques appear promising, it will be a half-decade or so before they’ll have a measurable effect, said sustainability chief Lampa.
“We can’t just sit and wait for the technology to take off,” Lampa said. “We believe we have a role to play.”