Narrator: These fibers are made from old clothes.
It's part of a process that can turn nearly any used fabric
into something brand new.
And fashion retailer H&M bets this solution
could eventually recycle some of the billions
of tons of textile waste produced every year.
But can a fast-fashion company solve the problem
it helped create?
We went to Hong Kong and Sweden to find out.
Most recycled textiles are turned into mattress stuffing
or insulation.
And the original materials are scraps
from the factory floor, not used clothing.
But this facility inside a Hong Kong shopping mall
is the first in the world to turn used clothes
into new clothes, all in one place.
First, a technician like Emily Shao examines the garment.
Narrator: This ozone chamber sanitizes the fabric
in about an hour.
Then Emily removes the buttons, labels, and zippers
and cuts the garment so the fabric is easy to work with.
The shredder strips the bits of cloth down further.
Narrator: But this part of the process
does require some new materials.
Narrator: Another machine mixes that cotton
with the recycled skirt.
Emily then rolls the mixed fibers into clumps
and feeds them into a machine
that turns them into what's called a fiber web.
But what happens next makes the assembly line in Hong Kong
the first of its kind.
The fiber web gets bundled into these snake-like slivers.
The slivers are then spun into ply yarn,
the building blocks of a new garment.
Finally, a machine knits a new sweater
based on a computer design.
Shoppers pay about $65 to recycle clothing here.
How do we help consumers think
about their clothes differently?
Well, that's one of the reasons why we have a glass box,
doing research in a shopping mall.
Narrator: The H&M Foundation partnered
with the Hong Kong Research Institute
of Textiles and Apparel.
That investment allowed the company to license
and install the technology at one of their stores
in Stockholm, where the company is headquartered.
H&M calls it the Looop.
Here, shoppers pay only $18
to see the recycling process in action.
That's about the price of a new pair
of the brand's sweatpants.
Virginia: That's how it comes out.
And then this is the only part that has to be removed.
Narrator: Virginia, the technician,
trims the extra yarn, and the garment is ready to go.
It takes three days to recycle one garment.
That seems like a lot of time and effort
to turn a sweater into a new sweater.
That's because a factory like this,
that can recycle thousands of tons of clothes a day,
doesn't exist yet.
But H&M says that eventually this kind of technology
could be a global solution for textile waste.
The holy grail is garment-to-garment recycling,
and that's for me where today, most our investment going to.
Narrator: But the fashion retailer continues to grow
by selling cheap clothes to more and more people.
Cameraperson: How often do you go and buy new clothes?
Maybe one time a week.
Filmmaker: How big is your wardrobe?
It's like maybe half of my apartment.
We're retail kings and queens.
She needs a walk-in closet, yes.
Narrator: But Swedes aren't the biggest contributors
to textile waste.
The average American spends over $1,800 a year
on new clothes
and throws away 200 T-shirts' worth of textiles every year.
People didn't always treat clothing as disposable.
Fast fashion really took off in the 1990s,
thanks to polyester.
The synthetic fiber made from petroleum
costs half as much as cotton.
I think very few people realize that
most of the time today, they're wearing plastic.
Narrator: By the year 2000,
polyester overtook cotton as the most popular fiber
in the world.
That's the same year H&M opened its first US store
in New York City.
Since then, global clothing production has doubled.
And if nothing changes, it will nearly double again by 2030.
All that used apparel can end up in places
like Accra, Ghana,
which has one of the world's largest
secondhand clothing markets.
Every week, 15 million garments
pass through the Kantamanto market.
And nearly half of that goes to landfill,
is burned, or gets swept into waterways.
Liz Ricketts: We've completely devalued what clothing is.
Clothing is now disposable,
and I don't know how we come back from treating it
like a plastic bag or like a plastic bottle.
Narrator: Liz Ricketts has spent over a decade
documenting how used clothes from wealthy countries
are exported around the world.
The clothing that's going to landfill,
a lot of it is wearable.
Narrator: And a lot of the waste
comes from familiar brands.
It's definitely, top 10, what you would expect.
It's H&M, it's Zara, MNS, Adidas, Nike, Gap.
Narrator: It would take the Looop recycling machine
almost 50,000 years to deal with just one week's worth
of waste from the market.
Liz: You can't really convince yourself that creating clothing
but doing it better is somehow going to solve this issue
that there's simply too much clothing.
Narrator: Still, H&M executives say they're serious
about scaling up recycling.
The company has set a goal of using only recycled polyester
by the end of the decade.
We have developed together with Hong Kong RITA
the machine called the green machine.
Narrator: The H&M Foundation invested $12 million
into technologies like this machine that recycles polyester,
and plans to build a larger factory
that can recycle over 3,000 pounds of clothes per day.
But HKRITA's CEO admits that recycling has a long way to go
before it can make a dent
in the industry's growing waste output.
The commercial-scale, useful recycling systems
have to be in the order of magnitude
of at least thousands of tons a day.
Narrator: Today, less than 1% of used clothing
is recycled into new garments.
Edwin: It is clear to us that we don't have
a lot of time.
We have this danger of doing too little too late.
Narrator: Experts say that recycling
can never solve the problem of textile waste.
Liz: Brands have basically convinced citizens
that we have a waste problem
because we don't have recycling technology.
That is not why we have a waste problem.
It's only going to be solvable if we confront growth
and if companies stop overproducing.
Narrator: H&M has no plans to reduce production
of new clothing.
We are a growth company.
Our ambition is how do we make that growth being meaningful?
Narrator: And consumers can do their part by buying less
and holding onto their current wardrobe longer.
Liz: We always recommend that people take a year off
of buying anything new.
Narrator: Even HKRITA's CEO recognizes recycling alone
can't solve the problem.
The companies that manufacture clothes
will need to change the way they do business.
And that is what keeps him up at night.
Edwin: My nightmare, my nightmare scenario in the industry,
is that we are satisfied.
We're happy with very modest goals,
but that doesn't really do anything for anybody.
And then we'll be accused of greenwashing,
and by and large, it will be true.