Danish fashion group’s Bestseller A/S announced two projects to accelerate its move to a more circular business model in Bangladesh to follow the motto “waste not, want not.” An estimated 400,000 tonnes of production waste is generated in Bangladesh each year, but less than five percent of this is currently recycled domestically.
One project is about using the company’s own cutting waste. The other project is about creating a recycling process of yarns. For both projects, Bestseller collaborates with suppliers in Bangladesh through its experimental sustainability hub Fashion Forward Lab because this is where a significant part of the group’s total garment production takes place.
The Bestseller Group has therefore launched a longstanding project for its Selected, Name It, and Vero Moda brands. It will work with GMS Composite Knitting, its largest jersey supplier in Bangladesh, to use textile scraps in new collections. The first such collections are expected to be available in spring 2022.
Camilla Skjonning Jorgensen, sustainable materials & innovation manager at Bestseller, said, “We’re working locally in Bangladesh with one of our big, longstanding suppliers to ensure our production waste is used within a closed-loop system in a fully transparent supply chain. In short, this means we are collecting and recycling our own brands’ cutting waste into new styles. We want to explore how we can keep the cotton waste in Bangladesh and set up workable circularity systems there. Keeping the waste in Bangladesh, even with the same supplier, benefits both economic and environmental perspectives, which we value immensely.”
Bestseller is also collaborating with Bangladeshi recycled cotton fiber firm Cyclo, whose mission is to responsibly recycle the hundreds of tonnes of cotton fabric discarded daily as cutting waste. By eliminating the dyeing process, Cyclo’s mechanical recycling process dramatically reduces water, energy, chemicals, and carbon emissions.
