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Nike, H&M, Burberry Join Forces for Sustainable Fashion


FILE - British designer Stella McCartney appears at the end of her Fall/Winter 2017-2018 women's ready-to-wear collection show during Paris Fashion Week, in Paris, March 6, 2017. Last year, McCartney became the first designer to sign up with the Make Fashion Circular initiative, which aims to eliminate waste and pollution and ensure products and materials are reused.
FILE - British designer Stella McCartney appears at the end of her Fall/Winter 2017-2018 women's ready-to-wear collection show during Paris Fashion Week, in Paris, March 6, 2017. Last year, McCartney became the first designer to sign up with the Make Fashion Circular initiative, which aims to eliminate waste and pollution and ensure products and materials are reused.

Major global brands Nike, H&M, Burberry and Gap have signed on to an
initiative that aims to improve the industry's record on sustainability after a study found less than 1 percent of clothing is recycled.

The Ellen MacArthur Foundation, set up by the record-breaking sailor, announced on Wednesday that the brands were joining its Make Fashion Circular scheme to reduce global waste from fashion by recycling raw materials and products.

The head of the Make Fashion Circular initiative, Francois Souchet, said the aim was to create a "unstoppable momentum" toward an economy in which clothes are never seen as waste.

"Over the past 15 years clothing production has doubled, while the amount of time we wear those clothes before throwing them away — usually to be landfilled or incinerated — has fallen dramatically," Souchet told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

"We can change this ever faster model into one in which clothes are never seen as waste, through better design and new leasing and resale business models," he said in an email.

'Incredibly wasteful' industry

The four brands will join British designer Stella McCartney, who last year became the first to sign up to the initiative, which aims to eliminate waste and pollution and ensure products and materials are reused.

At the time McCartney, a longtime advocate of sustainable fashion, said her industry was "incredibly wasteful and harmful to the environment," urging other brands to join.

In a report published in November, the foundation exposed the scale of waste and pollution in the fashion industry, revealing that less than 1 percent of clothing is recycled.

Half a million metric tons of plastic microfibers are released from washed clothing annually, equivalent to more than 50 billion plastic bottles, exacerbating ocean pollution, the report said.

The participating brands will spend three years developing practical ways in which the industry can move away from polluting materials and processes, working with HSBC bank.

"There is no single company that can solve the challenge of shifting the whole industry from a linear to a circular business model on its own. That is why a collaborative approach is crucial," said H&M spokesman Iñigo Sáenz Maestre in an email.

H&M has set a target of only using recycled or other sustainably sourced materials by 2030, he said, and 35 percent of its garments are currently produced that way.

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    Reuters

    Reuters is a news agency founded in 1851 and owned by the Thomson Reuters Corporation based in Toronto, Canada. One of the world's largest wire services, it provides financial news as well as international coverage in over 16 languages to more than 1000 newspapers and 750 broadcasters around the globe.

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