Collection corner

Closed loop

Swedish fashion retailer H&M, Stockholm, has announced the launch of its first line of clothing made from recycled textile fibers collected from its Garment Collecting initiative. The five denim pieces, including jeans and jackets, contain 20 percent recycled cotton, the company says.

H&M launched Garment Collecting in 2013 as a global initiative to encourage its customers to bring in unwanted garments of any brand and in any condition to H&M stores to be given a new life. Customers who donate clothes are awarded with a store discount.

The U.S.Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that textile waste occupies nearly 5 percent of all landfill space.

H&M CEO Karl-Johan Persson says in an interview on the company’s website, “I hope that in the future, upcycling old clothes will be a standard in our industry … and that making clothes will have a minimal impact on waters.”

H&M, which says it strives for sustainability, was recently ranked 64th on Corporate Knights Capital’s Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations in the World. In 2012, H&M recycled 92 percent of the waste handled at its distribution centers, according to the company’s website.

For more information, visit www.hm.com/recycling.
 

Bottle bricks

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has announced the opening of the “Border Gateway to Nature” at Border Field State Park in San Diego. The 400-acre park in the southwestern corner of the U.S. had inadequate signage and access points, which have since been improved by using trash pulled from the Tijuana River Valley and tributary canyons as building materials.

In September 2013, the EPA awarded a $45,000 grant through its Border 2020 program and the San Diego Foundation to 4Walls International, a nonprofit binational environmental group, to create artistic elements and park benches made of plastic soda bottles stuffed with river waste as fill material for construction. 4Walls paid Tijuana residents 5 pesos for each plastic bottle stuffed with trash from the river that they collected; those bottles were then used as building materials, along with concrete, in benches and a welcome sign.

A recent study prepared by San Diego-based URS, under the California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery (CalRecycle), estimates that more than 10 million plastic bottles are clogging the sensitive ecosystem.

Steven Wright, 4Walls executive director, says cleaning up the Tijuana River Valley as well as making use of the material collected improves the lives of residents. “The whole point is that we can source manage the garbage upstream in Tijuana, incentivizing it as sustainable building material for affordable housing, schools, parks and community centers. We can essentially incentivize the trash with a higher quality of life,” Wright says.

For more information, visit www.epa.gov/border2020 or www.4wallsintl.org.
 

In addition to updating Border Gateway to Nature with a $45,000 grant, 4Walls International created park space and a nature reserve in a canyon in Tijuana just south of the border fence known as “Los Sauces.” The park made use of 4,000 discarded plastic soda bottles stuffed with trash, 276 glass bottles and 1,000 pounds of miscellaneous plastic and foam to build the site’s infrastructure. The innovative construction technique reduced the cost of raw materials, such as concrete, while increasing the structures’ strength, the U.S. EPA says.

Do you have a unique recycling-focused story? Please send a press release to Megan Workman at mworkman@gie.net.