Fashion in China

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Moreover, government could subsidize retailers who are willing to hold the recycling project. It can reduce the financial burden of the retailers as they operating the recycling project involve huge investment.

Clothing recycling program in China:

Green Initiatives, a nonprofit organization that aims to minimize or reverse the environmental degradation in China brought about by economic growth, have launched their new initiative, The Fibre Project. It is Shanghai’s first closed-loop clothing and shoes recycling project. Green Initiatives told Talk that Shanghai alone produced approximately 130000 tons of textile waste, with typically 85% ending up in landfills and incinerators even though more than 90% is recyclable in 2013. Furthermore, at least 50% of the clothes we discard are reusable. That is why they have created a program to collect these unwanted items and send them away to be reused, recycled or up-cycled.

They tried to make the program more accessible to Shanghai residents. Currently, it is possible to deposit clothes at Urban Hotel and five Element Fresh locations: Shanghai Centre, Super Brand Mall, Yueda 889, Gubei Garden Plaza and Jinqiao. They are one of the successful organiztion to hold a recycling project.

Furthermore, Uniqlo in Japan has clothes recycling project. They collected 3 million articles of clothing for refugees. I think that the Uniqlo in China could using the similar method to hold the project. However, the most difficult things of them to hold the project in China are people in china lack of awareness of clothes recycling and lack of the all-around recycling system. Therefore, the most important step is have to increasing awareness of textile waste issue to consumers.

The recycling process:

Companies need to set up an all-around recycling process. Such as, when is the collection period, what is the collection method , where is the collection site, what is valid items, what should consumers need to do before donating clothing and so on.

Step1: Donating your unwanted clothes to retailers.

Step2: Retailer sends it to manufacturing centre or factory.

Step3: Separating wearable and non wearable items.

Step4: If it is wearable, reuse them. Sort according to season, gender and product type. If it is non-wearable, recycle them. Used as fuel or fiber.

Step5: They should determine how they deal with the clothes. They can donate them to refugee or make a regenerate fiber by using those clothes. It should depend on the structure and financial ability of the companies.

Step6: Communicates with employees on the ground at clothing distribution points throughout the world and shares that feedback with its customers to encourage the development of new initiative.

Step7: Generate a report of program to measure the result and then disclose to public. They can use the Higg Index indicators to measure the outcomes.

For example, the collection process of Uniqlo.[pic 2]

Short-term results:

There are no any obvious result in collecting old clothes in short-term. It is because building up the awareness of environmentally friendly needs to take long time. This is a process that consumers influenced by social media, retailer and government education. Consumers need to take time to change their behavior. However, we can see the reaction from the consumers in short period. They can obverse consumer’s reaction then taking appropriate action. Their maybe are some failure at the very beginning but retailers should improve their strategies during the observation and from failure. The collection project would not be work in short-term development.

Long-term results:

In long-term development, we can see the actual result on the clothing collection project. The clothing collection project would be work in China in the long-term development if the three factors are cooperating well with each other. If they cannot grab the consumer attention of textile waste problem and enhance awareness of recycling old clothes, the project cannot be work in long term. Three factors are interdependent and cannot lack of any one of them.

What is the key challenges of clothing collection:

There are fews key challenges of clothing collection in China. Firstly, consumer awareness and convenience of donating or brining back used items. Secondly, logistical challenges and resource or space constrains associated with in-store collection. Thirdly, the cost of the shipping collected items for processing, labour cost of employing specific people to handling the collected items. Fourthly, brands and retailers may feel that the collection options do not meet their needs and goals comprehensively and are therefore less likely to promote these options to customers, since most collected items are sold for reuse in markets that lack collection mechanisms, or infrastructure to support recycling. In other words, while collecting clothing and footwear for reuse might prolong the life of a product, this only delays a trip to the landfill in the long run because technology to collect, process and recycle these items is not in place in many locations.

Summary:

Is it possible to work the collection of old clothing in China? The answer is depend on the three factors which government, retailers and social media can cooperate with each other or not. They also need to overcome the challenges during the project. If government subsidizes the retailers to encourage them running the collection project and retailer work with social media to spread out the informations and messages to textile waste to consumers, it will be possible to work the collection of old clothing in China because they are raising the awareness of the consumers and providing the most convenience donation method for them. These process will be taking a long period so that we will not able to see the outcome immediately. However, if those three elements work together loosely, the collection of old clothing in China would not be possible to work.

Reference:

FAST RETAILING (2014). All-Product Recycling Initiative. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.fastretailing.com/eng/csr/environment/recycle.html. [Last Accessed 10 April 2015.]

ETHICAL FASHION FORUM (2011). FAST FASHION, "VALUE"