Photograph by Alecio Ferrari / Connected Archives
Words by Daphne Chouliaraki Milner
When you purchase an item of clothing from a fast fashion brand, the likelihood is that you’ll wear it just seven times before throwing it away. This is a problem—a very serious one with wide-reaching repercussions—and fast fashion brands say they recognize it, too.
In response, some retailers have launched take-back schemes, which they claim will help prolong the life cycle of clothes. The idea is that customers can drop off their unwanted items in-store for brands to then reuse, repurpose, and recycle—turning what would otherwise have been considered “waste” into new products. Fast fashion retailer H&M was one of the first major brands to launch a take-back scheme 10 years ago, and reports that it has since received over 155,000 tonnes of textiles. Primark, Uniqlo, and Zara are among the brands that have followed suit.
It is not unreasonable, then, to assume that when a garment is returned to a store as part of a take-back program that it either be used to make another item or, if it’s in bad condition, shredded into textile fibers and used for insulation. The reality, however, is complicated—and can be far more insidious.
When a green skirt was returned to an H&M store on Oxford Street in central London in 2022, the hope was, as a sign on the shop floor read, “to close the loop” and contribute to a circular fashion system. Instead, that same skirt traveled 24,892 kilometers (15,467 miles) across the world through the United Arab Emirates SOEX processing facility only to be dumped in a vacant lot in Bamako, Mali, five months later, according to research by the Changing Markets Foundation.
The skirt was not an anomaly. Between August 2022 and July 2023, Changing Markets Foundation worked with Zero Waste France and Zero Waste Alliance Ukraine on the report, titled Take-Back Trickery, to track the journeys of garments submitted to take-back schemes at retailers like Zara, Nike, New Look, Uniqlo, Primark, and The North Face. The location of each item was recorded on a daily basis using AirTags throughout the course of the 12 months that the study was ongoing.
A pair of blue trousers brought to a C&A store in Germany traveled 464 km (288 miles), and were eventually burned for fuel at a cement plant. A gray hoodie that was returned to Primark traveled 2,346 km (1,457 miles) within the UK and was then dumped in a skip in an industrial estate. Meanwhile, a navy puffer jacket handed into a Zara store in the UK was shipped to Lithuania, traveling 2,224 km (1,381 miles), and has since been stuck in a warehouse. And finally, a white zip-up cardigan that was returned to H&M to “close the loop” was sent to a market in Bamako, Mali, 24,892 km (15,467 miles) away. Some brands contested Changing Markets’ findings, including Primark, which claimed the hoodie was resold in Budapest.
When you purchase an item of clothing from a fast fashion brand, the likelihood is that you’ll wear it just seven times before throwing it away.
Other items were reported to have been shredded, downcycled, never moved from the drop-off point,or alternatively resold in countries like Slovakia, Belarus, and Ukraine.
“Big companies are discarding clothes that they promised to give a second life,” said Urska Trunk, campaign manager at the Changing Markets Foundation and author of Take-Back Trickery. “We found that more than three-quarters of these clothes—in great condition, in perfect conditions, fit to be reused—were either destroyed, stuck in the system, or sent to countries that are already struggling to deal with the amount of clothing that comes from Europe.”
Trunk described the take-back schemes she monitored as nothing other than “another greenwashing trick” because they “fool consumers into believing that they are making responsible choices and creating an illusion that the fashion industry has its waste issue under control, when in reality they aren’t even dealing with the problem.”
Take-Back Trickery is not the only report to shine a light on the systemic issues that see brand-owned upcycling schemes routinely fail to deliver on their promises. A joint investigation by Swedish paper Aftonbladet and German tabloid Bild earlier this year found that H&M had been sending clothes meant for upcycling halfway across the world to countries including India, Romania, Ghana, and Benin.
“There’s nothing in me that trusts a brand-owned take-back program,” said fair fashion advocate Venetia La Manna. “I know they exploit their workers, I know they produce too many clothes. I know that they are champion greenwashers. They’ve never given me any reason to trust them. When it comes to recycling or reselling my clothes, I don’t want a corporation to be doing that for me. That’s not who I want to be giving my money to.”
The reality is that the regulation aimed at holding the industry accountable for its environmental damage and waste is still in development. Despite European Union environment commissioner Virginijus Sinkevičius pledging to tighten the EU’s laws on pollution and textile waste caused by the fashion system, which he described to The Business of Fashion as “the only industry which has escaped any sort of regulation,” the process is lengthy—and complicated. The EU parliament has voted in favor of legislation that would ban the incineration of unsold garments and require brands to pay for the cost of managing their textile waste, but the legislation likely won’t come into effect until 2028. Meanwhile, in the US, the Responsible Textile Recovery Act that would shift responsibility for textile waste onto brands, has been delayed.
The repercussions of the accelerating textile waste produced by the Global North are disproportionately felt by communities across the Global South.
Video by Bérénice Golmann-Pupponi
But the need for tougher control on waste is urgent. The repercussions of the accelerating textile waste produced by the Global North are disproportionately felt by communities across the Global South: in the microfibers polluting local waterways; in the harmful health effects felt by the girls and women who head-carry second hand bales from landfills to markets; in the punitive taxation systems penalizing designers upcycling discarded clothes; and in the destruction of entire ecosystems that pose life-threatening risks for those living nearby.
“I’m afraid that in the absence of regulation, the kinds of deceptions [we saw in Take-Back Trickery] will continue,” said Trunk. “The only way to fix this is to implement the legislation that would make brands responsible, not only for what they say, but also what they do with the clothing they collect.”
The holdup is also down to the lack of infrastructure available for brands that are looking to more efficiently upcycle and reuse old textiles. Much of the sorting process is still primarily done manually, and garments are often made from blended materials and fibers as well as plastic zips and metal buttons. The recycling process would therefore require each textile and material to be separated, which is both expensive and polluting.
“The problem is that we simply produce too much,” said Anastasiia Martynenko, head of Zero Waste Society. “Managing this enormous volume of waste and resource-use is incredibly challenging, particularly within the pace of fast fashion.” It’s a pace that’s picking up year-on-year with short-form video platforms like TikTok and Instagram accelerating the rate at which trends rise and fall—and subsequently, reducing the lifespan of garments.
The issue of inefficient textile waste management isn’t limited to take-back schemes. Even the return of brand-new items are ending up in landfills en masse. Each year in the US, over three and a half billion pounds of textile waste is generated through returns, and yet Optoro— a reverse logistics technology company that works with brands and retailers to streamline returns—estimates that only 20% is defective.
“Returns policies have been very lenient,” said Amena Ali, chief executive officer of Optoro. “And that’s because brands know that if you actually make it hard to return items, it’s going to reduce the amount that people shop. Our goal is to make retail more sustainable by eliminating all waste from returns—but currently, it’s a ginormous issue along a number of dimensions.”
“If we’re really to tackle this issue, we need living wages for garment workers and caps on the amount of clothes that brands are producing every year.”
This is why any legislation aimed at minimizing textile waste must take into consideration the lengthy process of reverse logistics, which typically requires the returned item to be consolidated, quality assessed, and assuming it’s undamaged, then repackaged, resold, and reshipped. It’s a process that involves a lot of packaging and generates a lot of carbon emissions. To cut back on waste, Optoro reduces single-item shipping and packaging, utilizes AI-powered technology to track returned items, and proceeds to send any unsold items to verified resale platforms. But regulation needs to support a wider range of businesses to invest in new and improved systems that minimize the environmental cost of returned items—as much as they should dis-incentivise and penalize corporations that continue to evade responsibility.
It’s why some groups are lobbying for extended producer responsibility, placing the onus of payment for the management and recycling of items back onto brands. “We’ve been really involved in the legislative efforts of extended producer responsibility here in the United States,” said Rachel Kibbe, CEO and founder of Circular Service Group. “And the model of EPR [we’re putting forward must include] returns and excess inventory… It’s about making companies more responsible for the inventory that they produce overall.”
Still, others say that’s not enough because businesses continue to sidestep accountability. “Even though France has an extended producer responsibility system, the hierarchy of waste treatment methods, which is enshrined in law, is not systematically respected at the end of the life of our clothes,” said Manon Richert, communications manager at Zero Waste France. “A virtually new garment can be sent to Germany to be destroyed and used as padding or rags, when it could have been sold secondhand.”
The scales of responsibility must shift to render each H&M skirt brought into store for upcycling the responsibility of the Swedish retailer—not the communities in Bamako that have been cleaning up the mess of overconsumption caused by the Global North for decades. That means more efficient upcycling schemes and streamlined returns, but it also means systematic changes to a system that’s built on exploitation and profits off the very same throwaway culture it’s responsible for building.
“If we’re really to tackle this issue, we need living wages for garment workers and caps on the amount of clothes that brands are producing every year,” said La Manna. “We need to decrease the volume of production. Otherwise, everything else becomes a plaster for us to feel better about the issue—without actually getting to the root cause.”
Join our membership community. Support our work, receive a complimentary subscription to Atmos Magazine, and more.
Why One H&M Skirt Traveled 15,000 Miles After It Was Brought Back to the Store
