Conscious Collecting

We all have a few neglected garments at the back of our wardrobes – old favourites that we no longer wear and that aren’t quite good enough to pass on to a friend or donate to an op shop. And now there’s another way to recycle these items, with the launch of high street giant H&M’s global Garment Collecting Initiative in Australia.

It works like this: simply pop into Melbourne’s GPO and deposit any item of clothing from any brand (and in any condition) into the H&M collection boxes. The clothing will then be hand-sorted, processed and made available for re-use (either sold as secondhand goods, or turned into textile fibres, manufacturing products or even cleaning cloths), with proceeds from the initiative going towards the H&M Conscious Foundation and UNICEF Australia.

For every bag of clothing you deposit, you’ll receive a 15% off-an-item voucher to use in store – so give your closet a spring clean and don’t let fashion go to waste! Some garments from other countries have already been incorporated into a range of recycled denim jackets and jeans, and in the future H&M hopes to find a solution for recycling all donated textile fibres into new garments – creating a closed loop fashion system and minimising the volume of textile waste that ends up as landfill.