H&M Group, the parent company of H&M, & Other Stories, and ARKET, has become a key partner in Fashion for Good's Sorting For Circularity project.

H&M Group joins Inditex as important project partners, with Adidas, BESTSELLER, and Zalando as corporate partners, and Levi Strauss & Co., Otto, and PVH Corp. as members of a larger working group, in a move illustrating the "value of pre-competitive collaboration."

Fashion For Good initiated the Sorting For Circularity project in May 2020, with support from the Laudes Foundation, with the goal of creating the necessary infrastructure to effectively scale textile recycling.

The goal of the project is to better comprehend the material composition of textiles and to improve on the current textile sorting system, which is primarily reliant on manual input and cannot provide correct insights because clothing labels are often unreliable or missing. The project's ultimate goal is to establish an open-source platform that will allow textile sorters to match their textile waste with recyclers.

In addition to welcoming H&M Group, Fashion For Good has stated that it has enlarged its regional scope for the initiative and now includes Spain and Poland in the study, both of which are key recycling hubs, with Poland being Europe's third-largest exporter of used clothing.

By integrating the new areas, the project will provide a more thorough assessment of recycling capacities in various locations, as well as expose regional variances in textile waste generation, underlining the need for innovation, investment, and future legislative changes.

Anna-Karin Sundelius, Circular Strategy Lead at H&M Group, said that to enable the fashion industry to decouple growth from natural resource use, they need to make recycled materials more available on a larger scale. Many abandoned garments and textiles are viewed as waste rather than resources; this needs to change! They can only change their business into a circular one through industry-wide alliances and investments in research and innovation.