Just a month ago, an investigation broadcast on Danish television channel TV2's "Operation X" program unveiled that, since 2013, fast fashion retailer H&M may have incinerated around 60 tons of its own new and unworn apparel at a waste disposal company in Denmark. Though apparently this is a recurrent practice at the Swedish retailer, H&M denied the accusation stating that the garments had been sent to incineration because of mold or because they did not comply with chemical restrictions.
Yet last week history repeated itself when Bloomberg reported that a Swedish power plant is burning discarded H&M clothes. According to the report, the 54-year-old combined heat and power station in Västerås, northwest of Stockholm, is in the process of converting from oil- and coal-fired generation to a fossil fuel-free facility. The switch should occur by 2020, so at the moment the plant is burning recycled wood and trash, and received a final shipment of coal last Tuesday that will power the two remaining fossil-fuel generators until the end of the decade.
Despite Sweden investing in the green economy, there are actually still quite a few places in the country that employ coal and oil to heat homes and offices during cold winter days. The possibility of converting these old plants to burn biofuels and garbage may therefore mean a significant step forward in the reduction of fossil fuel units.
Yet this practice of burning clothes may be deemed unethical: H&M highlighted again in this case via Johanna Dahl, head of communications for H&M in Sweden, that only clothes containing mold or not complying with the strict restrictions on chemicals are usually destroyed. The Västerås plant incinerated around 15 tons of discarded clothes in 2017, against 400,000 tons of trash (in 1996, when the plant was at its peak, it burnt 650,000 tons of coal).
Now, as much as H&M may want people to believe this is a sustainable practice, it sounds a bit crazy: overproducing clothes is indeed already highly polluting, but if these garments are toxic or contain chemical residue, burning them doesn't sound very eco-friendly at all.
Besides, despite H&M stating they mainly burn clothes with mold and "increased levels of lead", the TV2 investigation showed that this has become a consolidated practice: the Denmark-based waste disposal company has been incinerating clothes from H&M since 2013, something that makes you think the retailer is more about destroying unsold stocks than about being eco-friendly.
Getting rid of unwanted garments in dubious ways is not new for H&M: in 2010 the retailer was accused of cutting up and slashing with razors and box cutters and then dumping in the streets unsold clothes at a store in New York. Apparently, the practice was well-known and people who needed clothes would go and salvage what had not been destroyed.
Quite a few pieces defending this by now consolidated H&M practice seem to be praising the retailer for helping the power plant in Sweden to replace coal-sourced energy, but couldn't the solution for retail giant Hennes & Mauritz stand in producing less, rather than manufacturing more, burning some and making the majority of us believe that this is an ethical and eco-friendly practice? Maybe a combination of producing (and incinerating) less chemical-free clothes and donating the overstock to charities would be a solution. As an alternative, the retailer should call Michelangelo Pistoletto - with H&M waste clothes he could indeed do the biggest "Venus of the Rags" installation ever and even enter the Guinness World Records.
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