H&M Group and Remondis, a waste management and recycling company have announced the formation of Looper, a new joint venture aimed at developing infrastructure and solutions to collect and sort used and unwanted garments and textiles in Europe for resale and recycling.
According to H&M, roughly 60% of used clothing in the EU is discarded. Looper will collect and sort garments from across Europe at its facilities in Germany, providing feedstock for companies involved in reuse and recycling.
Further, the company intends to use approximately 40 million garments in 2023.
Looper will be led by CEO Emily Bolon, who most recently served as Head of Commercial, Advisory, and Strategic Partnerships at H&M Group. She was in charge of teams that identified and secured complex, high-value partnerships.
Bolon said:
“By building infrastructure and solutions for collection and sorting, we hope to move one step closer toward enabling circularity, thereby minimizing the CO²-impact and improving resource efficiency.”
The new joint venture follows a series of initiatives by H&M to improve fashion circularity, including the establishment of the first global garment collecting initiative by a fashion company in 2013, as well as investments in companies developing technologies to enable textile recycling through its investment arm H&M CO:LAB.
Looper stated that it intends to innovate in the textile collection and sorting by testing new collection schemes and implementing automated sorting technologies. The company also intends to cultivate diverse partners in the reuse and recycling sectors.
Marc Schubert, COO of Looper, said:
“We are convinced that the textile loop, due to its very high complexity, can only be closed with trusting, innovative and like-minded partners along the value chain and are pleased to have found the synergy between H&M Group and Remondis.”