Swedish fashion giant H&M Group has teamed up with waste management company Remondis, in order to establish a joint venture that will gather, sort, and sell discarded and unwanted clothing and textiles.

H&M and Remondis each share 50% of the freestanding joint venture Looper Textile Co. Unwanted clothing and textiles will be gathered and sorted by the company into several streams so they can be recycled or reused.

According to the two companies, less than 40% of worn clothing is now collected in the EU. As a result, 60% of post-consumer textiles are wasted. In order to enable circularity and reduce the CO2 impact while increasing resource efficiency, they want to construct infrastructure and solutions for collection and sorting.

Emily Bolon, CEO of Looper Textile Co, said that H&M Group was the first fashion brand to establish a clothing collection effort globally in 2013 and has invested through its investment arm H&M CO:LAB in businesses that create technologies to enable textile recycling. The H&M Group is taking a more active role in building the infrastructure required to finish the fashion supply chain by establishing this stand-alone joint venture. Remondis has been a pioneer in waste management for many years and possesses important expertise in delivering collection and sorting solutions at scale. They are glad to have discovered the synergy between H&M and the textile industry since they are confident that the textile loop can only be completed with reliable, creative, and like-minded partners along the value chain.

The goal of Looper is to establish itself as a leading supplier of feedstock to businesses and innovators involved in the resale and recycling of textiles. The joint venture is beginning operations in Europe with the goal of extending the highest usage of about 40 million clothes by 2023. The business intends to innovate in the fields of textile collecting and sorting, for instance, by experimenting with new collection methods and putting automated sorting techniques like near-infrared sorting into use, as well as by cultivating a variety of partners in the reuse and recycling sectors.