H&M Vows to Stop Trashing Un-Used Clothes ... Your Play Wal-Mart

by Amy Westervelt – January 7, 2010Follow Amy Westervelt on Twitter

After being outed yesterday by the New York Times for dumping un-used clothes during a particularly cold winter (mostly cut with razors so that no one could ever wear them), H&M announced today that it will now donate unsold items to charity instead. There has been a lot of finger-shaking at the trendy, low-priced retailer over all this, but what I can't figure out is why they would ever have opted to just throw out clothes instead of getting the PR value out of donating perfectly good sweaters to cold people who need them.

According to Nicole Christie, a spokeswoman for the company, the Swedish retailer's policy is, in fact, to donate unused clothes. Christie told the Associated Press today that she wasn't sure why the New York City store was mutilating and discarding clothes.

The same graduate student who discovered the discarded H&M clothing also found a bag of Wal-Mart items with holes punched through them. No word from the big box store yet on whether this is common practice, but given the high profile of the story and H&M's speedy response, it seems like something they might want to get on top of quickly.

Amy Westervelt, Journalist
The former Managing Editor of the Journal, Amy is associate editor for The Faster Times and This Week in Earth, a columnist for Forbes, and contributes to an assortment of other magazines and websites. In 2007, Amy won the Folio Eddie for excellence in magazine editorial for her feature on algae as a feedstock for biofuel, which was published in Sustainable Industries magazine.

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