From bottles to fashion

Once again, H&M has joined forces with Danone AQUA for another round of the bottle2fashion project, which transforms plastic bottle waste from the shores of Indonesia into recycled polyester. This season alone, bottle2fashion will collect and recycle around 3.5 million PET bottles! Choosing plastic bottles for your children's clothes might not be an obvious choice, but for the H&M kidswear collection, the recycled polyester from these bottles has been blended with organic cotton and recycled cotton to create cosy, everyday pieces in fashion-forward colours and silhouettes. With plastic pollution a huge threat to marine populations and landfills, it's now time to change fashion – one piece at a time.

“Helping to keep beaches and oceans clean, bottle2fashion is another exciting step forward for a more circular and collaborative approach at H&M. To give a second life to disposable plastic bottles as recycled polyester is valuable in so many ways — to Indonesia’s environment, economy and social values — but also the world and our customers. And once the kids outgrow the clothes, we encourage the items be brought back to us through our garment collection initiative so they can be recycled once again”, says Nellie Lindeborg, Assortment Sustainability Responsible at H&M.

But how does bottle2fashion work? PET bottles are collected from the shores of Indonesia, sorted, cleaned up, shredded into flakes and then recycled into polyester fibres. We blend those fibres with other materials to create the comfy pieces in this collection. This process not only saves energy and CO2 omissions, but also reduces the amount of raw materials needed to begin with. The collaboration with bottle2fashion also supports the Indonesian government’s initiative against marine pollution — while generating local jobs.

“Through the bottle2fashion initiative that we’ve conducted alongside H&M, for this season, Danone-AQUA has successfully collected around 71 tons of PET bottles from Kepulauan Seribu (Thousand Island) and Bandung Area. This is to show our commitment to prevent plastic from going into the ocean, which is also the manifestation of our #BijakBerplastik movement,” says Ratih Anggraeni, Senior Sustainable Packaging Manager, Danone Indonesia.

Source: hm.com