Fast Fashion’s Sustainability Promises Undermined by Waste

Hennes & Mauritz AB or H&M, the Swedish fashion giant, is in big trouble. According to its quarterly report released on 27 March 2018, the world's second-largest clothing retailer is now sitting on $4.3 billion of unsold garments and accessories. To reduce the stockpile, the company is planning to cut prices, slow expansion in stores, and boost its e-commerce instead. It may even get unsol…

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Unspoken Crisis: Mounting Textile Waste in China

With an exploding urban population and a rising middle-class, China is rapidly increasing material use and consumption. Alongside its burgeoning economy is a proliferation of consumer waste. While most debates are around the wastage of food or packaging materials like plastic and paper, little attention is paid to the old clothes that people clean out of their wardrobes. Chinese dump roughly 26…

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China to Expand Waste Import Ban

While many western cities and firms are scrambling to find solutions and workarounds for the mountains of waste plastic, unsorted paper, textile, and slag that can no longer be sent to China, the Chinese government just doubled down on January's waste ban with an announcement that over the next 18 months there will be an additional three stages to the existing ban. It is an announcement that ha…

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China’s Electric Vehicle Boom Brings a Wave of Battery Waste

The amount of retired EV (electric vehicle) batteries will grow at an unprecedented rate in China. Recycling them will bring twofold benefits – reducing the consumption of raw materials for producing new batteries and minimizing potential environmental and health hazards caused by the mismanagement of battery waste. – Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (中国工业和信息化部专家) With hundred…

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China’s Waste Ban and its Implications for the International Community

Background on the Issue As China took the lead in manufacturing, the reliance on raw materials opened the door to a new business: the waste trade. For many years, the system made sense; China exported inexpensive consumer goods to places like Europe, USA, and Japan. Shipping containers from these nations made their way back into China filled with recyclables. Chinese manufacturers could turn t…

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Event Report: Waste Management is a Collective Responsibility

Yesterday, in collaboration with the Shanghai European Chamber of Commerce, Collective Responsibility hosted a Lunch and Learn event to help increase awareness about waste and waste management in China. An interactive session, that ended with practical tips for individuals and companies to take to reduce their waste footprint, Rich Brubaker started the session provide insights from our research…

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Impact of China’s Waste Ban is Global

As the world’s largest waste importer, China received more than 7.35 million tons of plastic scraps and 28.5 million tons of mixed paper in 2016, about half of the globe’s total. Coming mainly from Europe, Japan, and the United States through direct or indirect trade via Hong Kong, for decades the products were flushed in China, a country that was willing to take these products, process them, and…

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LUXEPACK Sustainable Packaging Training

Last week, Collective Responsibility held two training sessions, in Shanghai and Shenzhen, to help packaging manufacturers in China incorporate sustainability into their products through innovations in design, materials and the production process. 60 participants from paper, plastic, and wood packaging suppliers joined the sessions to find out more about the business case for sustainability, an…

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Event Report: Shanghai eWaste Factory Visit

Last week, to understand more about the eWaste issue in China, we have organized a tour to TES-AMM, a eWaste factory in Jiading, Shanghai. 15 guests with an interest in sustainability area from Shanghai and Suzhou joined us for the tour. Opened in 2005, TES- AMM (Total Environmental Solutions Asset Material Management ) has established an Integrated WEEE Management Solutions for recycling e – w…

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E-Waste: Does the Informal System Do It Better?

In our extensive research into the informal waste systems of Shanghai over the last year, we have recently begun to explore the inner workings of a specific branch of this system: the e-waste stream. As the fastest growing waste stream, with over 16Mt generated in Asia, e-waste is hazardous, complex and costly to treat. It is also incredibly valuable with a thriving economy set up around it. Du…

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Innovative Solutions for Managing China’s Food Waste

While the topic of food waste has been a hot topic in the West, fueled in part by stories of 3,000 miles Caesar salads, in China the topic of food waste is only starting to become a topic of discussion. Unlike in the West though, where food waste is seen as a problem to be solved to avert future food crisis or is linked to larger problems like climate change, in China the problem has largely becom…

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Shanghai’s Informal Waste Sector is Formalizing. FAST!

With the rapid growth of China, citizens become more affluent and waste has been generated at an unprecedented rate, many of China’s first and second-tier cities have been forced to rethink waste management. Particularly, the informal waste management systems that have, to date, efficiently closed the loop on a lot of waste streams. In Shanghai, with two of its largest landfills in the process…

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Beijing Workshop: Closing the Loop on Waste

Last Thursday, Collective Responsibility hosted it’s Beijing session on “Closing the Loop on Waste” to look at how China is managing its growing supply of waste, the implications for business, and to share some best practices for how firms in the retail and manufacturing sector are closing the loop in China. Joining the session, we had Libo Ma, Director in Corporate Culture, Employee Engagement…

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Shanghai Workshop: Closing the Loop on Waste

This week, we hosted a workshop on “Closing the loop on Waste in China” for 20 sustainability professionals from various industries, to help them understand the waste management system in China and how they can engage their stakeholders in the circular economy. Focusing on the circular economy of waste, and how businesses hold the power to address the waste issue in China and the potential for…

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New Report: Informal Waste Management in China

Most people can make money from waste … They start work at five in the morning and get off at 10 at night; they never rest and don’t spend much money. In one year, about 72,000 RMB. After a little over a year, you can really make that much money. 10 years down the road, you can save quite a lot.” – Owner, Large Collection Centre The latest addition to our publications series “Informal Waste…

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