7 years ago - H&M has released an inspiring film emphasizing that there is only one rule in fashion – to recycle your clothes! Starring and narrated by icon Iggy Pop, and featuring appearances by blogger Pardeep Singh Bahra, emerging designer Loza Maleombho and artist Daniel Lismore, the piece supports H&M's Close the Loop collection and Global Recycling initiative, which to date, has recycled more than 260 billion pounds of unwanted clothing.
7 years ago - From startup designers to major retailers, the fashion world continues to battle our culture of fast fashion and wasteful wardrobes with innovative designs and recycling efforts.
7 years ago - Next month, H&M will introduce 16 new denim styles made using recycled cotton from textiles collected in the Garment Collecting initiative in H&M stores. The pieces for men, women and kids are the latest steps toward H&M’s goal of creating a closed loop for fashion, and will be available in all stores worldwide, as well as online.“Creating a closed loop for textiles, in which unwanted clothes can be recycled into new ones, will not only minimize textile waste, but also significantly reduce the need for virgin resources as well as other impacts fashion has on our planet,“ says CEO Karl-Johan Persson.
7 years ago - As only 15 percent of clothes, shoes and accessories are recycled each year — with the remaining 85 percent, 10.5 million tons, ending up in landfills — more and more apparel brands (including H&M, The North Face, American Eagle Outfitters, and most recently, Levi-Strauss) are taking initiative to collect and recycle textiles
8 years ago - Water is essential to business of all kinds — from resource extraction to retail. Its scarcity poses collective risks; not just to a company’s facilities, but also to the municipalities in which it operates and the communities comprising its consumer base.
8 years ago - Last month, Vancouver welcomed back the ninth season of Eco Fashion Week (EFW), to celebrate the ongoing transformation of the fashion industry into one that is aware of and co-exists with the environment. This year’s Eco Fashion Week fell during Earth Week, with Offsetters Climate Solutions on board as the Official Offset Sponsor, helping to raise awareness of the environmental, and more specifically, the carbon impact made by the fashion industry worldwide. The week was inspiring, energizing and reinvigorating, full of runway shows, speaker sessions, films and, of course, more shows!
8 years ago - At a shareholder meeting on Tuesday, a proposal to Kraft Foods Group asserting that non-recyclable packaging — particularly that of Capri Sun pouches — is wasting valuable resources received the support of 29.2 percent of shares voted, according to As You Sow. The shares favoring the proposal have a market value of more than $9 billion.
8 years ago - Meaningful Brands® – Havas Media Group’s metric of brand strength – is the first global study to show how our quality of life and wellbeing connects with brands at both a human and business level. The study includes 1,000 brands, 300,000 people, 12 industries and 34 countries; and covers the role brands play in our communities and our personal wellbeing, as well as marketplace factors that relate to product performance such as quality and price.
8 years ago - This week, W Hotels Worldwide, part of Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, became the latest company to jump on the plastic-waste-to-fabric train when it announced a new partnership with global music artist and entrepreneur will.i.am and The Coca-Cola Company, to bring the EKOCYCLE™ brand to W Hotel rooms around the world.
8 years ago - The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) this week announced the stunning latest results of its Clean by Design program, a global model for sustainable manufacturing that is working with multinational apparel brand partners Target, Gap, Levi Strauss and H&M
8 years ago - H&M more than doubled the amount of collected garments with its garment collective initiative in 2014, according to its new sustainability report. In total, more than 13,000 tons of textiles have been collected — as much fabric as in 65 million T-shirts.Now, the apparel company has established a new goal of increasing the amount of products made of recycled fibers by at least 300 percent by the end of 2015.
8 years ago - After years of searching for a solution to the worldwide problem of textile waste, pioneering textile upcycler Worn Again has joined forces with fashion retailer H&M and luxury, sport & lifestyle group Kering to bring to market a revolutionary innovation in clothing production and recycling.
8 years ago - March is here, and that means one thing to me — March Madness! For all its warts and shortcomings, the NCAA knows how to host a basketball championship. This tournament is so good that the first few days are now an unofficial national holiday, all leading up to the final game where one champion is crowned.
8 years ago - What happens when you send three young fashionistas to a Cambodian sweatshop for a month? Aftenposten, Norway’s biggest newspaper, answered this question with a five-part, online reality TV series.In “Sweatshop: Dead Cheap Fashion,” fashion-conscious Norwegians Anniken Jorgensen, Frida Ottesen and Ludvig Hambro fly to Phnom Penh, where they work with and interview people that work in the type of facility that produces clothes for some of their favorite brands. The three step fully into the life of the average textile worker, sleeping on concrete, living on $3 a day and sewing for eight hours a day.
8 years ago - Six more global brands have committed to the Textile Exchange’s Responsible Down Standard (RDS). The adidas Group, Black Diamond, Kathmandu, NAU, REI and Timberland have agreed to bring certified, responsible down to the marketplace.
8 years ago - Consumer products, manufacturing and heavy industry sectors are getting the best financial returns on solar power—the most popular renewable power technology for corporates—according to a new report by RE100, an initiative of The Climate Group in partnership with CDP.
8 years ago - The new buzzword among CEOs, entrepreneurs and ecologists is the idea of resilience: building the values, systems and behaviors within businesses and brands to cope with uncertainty and constant, disruptive change.From data breaches and hacked emails to information abundance and lightspeed digital evolution, uncertainty abounds.CMOs are at the center of these dynamics, balancing the complexities of brand reputation, consumer trust, instantaneous social media critiques, hyper-customization and, of course, business sales and growth.So, as we look to 2015, how can CMOs leverage these dynamics for competitive advantage and create enduring brands that deliver more value for consumers, employees, shareholders and society?
8 years ago - Two-thirds of the world's largest companies are reporting exposure to water risks, some of which have potential to limit growth, according to a new report by CDP. The news comes amid mounting shareholder concern around the business impacts from water scarcity, accessibility and poor water quality.
8 years ago - The North Face, H&M, Eddie Bauer and several other leading international fashion, bedding and outdoor brands have adopted a third-party certification standard that can be applied to any waterfowl-based supply chain to help ensure humane treatment of animals from gosling to end product.
8 years ago - H&M CEO Karl-Johan Persson recently called for the need for annual wage revisions in Bangladesh in line with local price inflation.The comments came during an October 14 meeting with the country's Minister of Commerce, Tofail Ahmed."We see that costs in society are negating many of the positive effects of increased wages. This is due to the absence of efficient systems of control leaving both workers and business owners in a difficult situation," Persson said.For several years, the retailer has worked towards establishing a fair living wage in Bangladesh — a key supplier country. H&M sources products from around 300 factories in the country, employing over 600,000 workers.