Business Insider
1 HN recommender · recommended in 3 months, 2022–2026
8:53 · 3.4M views · Jun 10, 2021
A Business Insider World Wide Waste episode on H&M's garment recycling machines, which turn used clothing into new apparel. It asks whether a fast fashion company can solve the waste problem it helped create.
Cited in threads on textile waste and clothing supply chains as an example of an industrial recycling attempt, with some skepticism about how far it progressed.
3 comments from Hacker News
Not how I imagined a "recycling center" to actually be an overseas landfill. Watched an interesting video of how H&M are dealing with textile waste: this video
Man I just went down a rabbit hole looking at their entire site, looking at their job openings and even looking at the prices of condos in Emeryville lol This sounds like such a cool company. 10% of emissions goes to the fashion industry...that is insane . We are talking ~3.8 billion tons of co2 annually. :O I remember watching this video years ago and hoping for more development: this video It always just seemed like a "research project". I guess the bureaucracy of old companies just like to stomp out radical thinking like this. I remember how Tesla's head of design tried to get a sustainable initiative going at his previous employer, Mazda. Unfortunately, he ran into so many roadblocks. He used to talk about how it was always going to be nothing more than a side project. The company was stuck in one direction, and anything radical like EVs were always a side project. That's probably one of the reasons why he left and took a risk on Tesla back when it was nearly bankrupt. Maybe that "Loop" project in the video above fell under the same constraints. I wish the best for these folks, I really hope they succeed.
Wow always interesting hearing new developments in unrelated industries. There just isn't enough time in the day to research each industry. Since you seem knowledgable, do you know what is the state of recycling old fabrics? I was fascinated by attempts to "process" old fabrics and mix them with other fabrics to create new garments as shown in this video but im not sure if this went anywhere. [1]: this video