The race to fashion industry circularity and sustainability has increased its pace, with many brands and retailers making targeted and real-time advancements.
Mango
Since it signed up to the Fashion Pact in 2019, Mango has made firm commitments in product, reducing emissions and waste, advancing the circular economy, and championing biodiversity, transparency and traceability.
Now, the Mango Committed line has evolved to become a permanent collection that includes all the garments with sustainable characteristics in the different Mango lines. This season, 79 percent of Mango apparel now form part of the Committed collection and the company expects the figure to reach 100 percent by 2022. The use of sustainable fibers and processes makes it possible to reduce its impact on the environment and contribute to a circular economy, it said.
Mango has set a target of using 100 percent sustainable cotton and 50 percent recycled polyester in its collections by 2025. Mango expects all of its cellulose fibers, such as lyocell, viscose and modal, to be of controlled origin and traceable by 2030.
“We have made the commitment to continue working to become a more sustainable company,” Mango CEO Toni Ruiz said. “This is why we are taking huge steps with very ambitious projects that will allow us to minimize our impact and achieve the strict sustainability targets we have set ourselves.”
As part of the commitment it made after signing the Fashion Pact regarding diversity, in April Mango will start a collaboration with Asociación Vellmarí, headed by Manu San Félix. Manu is a biologist, scuba diver and National Geographic photographer and explorer, and his mission is to bring nature closer to people, to inspire them and make them see the importance of oceans in people’s lives.
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Mango is also continuing its project to replace the plastic bags in its supply chain with paper bags. The goal of the company, in collaboration with its suppliers, is to progressively eliminate all the plastic bags it uses to distribute products throughout its production chain. Once this project is completed, this will allow Mango to cease using approximately 160 million plastic bags every year. From April this year, Mango will begin to implement this project with its suppliers in Turkey, before progressively continuing with all other countries in the coming months.
Improved energy efficiency in the design of new stores is another project the company is working on. To achieve this, the new store concept has energy-efficient lighting and temperature control systems, as well as a design which incorporates sustainable materials such as natural paint and recyclable materials.
Mango collected 42 tonnes of garments during 2020 through the recycling project it is carrying out in collaboration with Moda re-. The garments are collected in Mango stores for reuse, recycling and energy recovery. In 2020 Mango had 610 recycling points in its stores in 11 countries, and in 2021 will extend this service to countries such as Austria, Italy, Poland, Turkey, Switzerland and Russia, with more than 200 new recycling points.
In October, Mango published on its website a list of Tier 1 production factories, fulfilling the requirements of the Transparency Pledge Standard, an initiative committed to transparency in the supply chains of the clothing and footwear industries. The firm aims to publish a list of Tier 2 and Tier 3 factories by 2022.
H&M Group’s new Sustainability Performance Report highlights the progress the company has made on its way toward a more sustainable fashion future.
“Although we have made good progress advancing our sustainability agenda, the last 12 months have served to further reinforce the importance of sustainability and the need to accelerate this work,” Helena Helmersson, CEO H&M Group, said. “We all need to play our part in transforming our industry into one that is genuinely built around circularity.”
H&M highlighted some key developments from 2020, including 64.5 percent of materials are now from recycled or more sustainable sources, and the company reached its goal that 100 percent of cotton it uses it is organic, recycled or sourced in a more sustainable way.
“We set a new ambitious material goal, aiming to use 30 percent recycled material by 2025,” the company said. “This is supported by breakthroughs in the recycling of post-consumer fabric without quality loss. Innovations are moving out of the lab to our brands–Monki’s collection in collaboration with HKRITA’s Green Machine being one of many examples. To continue our journey of becoming a fully circular organization, H&M Group has developed a multi-brand packaging system with bags made of certified paper. They have been introduced to customers at COS, ARKET, Monki and Weekday and selected H&M brand markets and will be further rolled out in the upcoming months.”
To become even more transparent, the H&M brand initiated an on-product-transparency pilot with the Higg Index, a tool to create comparability of sustainability performance across the fashion industry, with 7 million customers participating in this test.
The company promoted advance sustainable change within the industry by launching Treadler, enabling others to access its supply chain. It also piloted blockchain technology to track three sustainable fibers through six levels of its supply chain.
In the beginning of 2021, H&M Group has issued a 500 million euro ($589 million) sustainability-linked bond with a maturity of 8.5 years. Sustainability-linked bonds are coupled to the company meeting a number of defined sustainability targets and help create a clear and transparent commitment.