Shopping students think green
Secondhand clothing, recycled fabrics in vogue in back-to-school season
NEW YORK - For the back-to-school season, many parents and their kids are thinking green.
Concerns about the environment have them looking for secondhand clothing or fashions made from reused material — but price still rules. Shoppers want quality and style in backpacks, jeans and the like without spending a lot more money.
Retailers like H&M, Target and J.C. Penney are coming out with more clothes that use waste from all sorts of sources, like recycled denim or leather, nylon waste, remnants of old garments or even plastic bottles.
J.C. Penney is delivering three styles of jeans this fall made from 20 percent polyester created from bottles under its Arizona brand, after seeing what it believes to be teen customers searching for “recycled jeans” on its site, the company said. Target started offering fashions made of polyester created from recycled plastic bottles with last year’s launch of its children’s brand Cat & Jack after focus groups of parents and children expressed interest in eco-friendly products.
James Reinhart, CEO and founder of the online used clothing marketplace Thredup, said he’s finding that many of the site’s shoppers aren’t motivated just by price the way they used to be but also by environmental concerns.
“If I was deciding between two items, I would pick up something more ecofriendly,” said Ellen Abramson, a mother of three. “But the price has to be comparable, and it has to be done in a fun, cool way.”
Abramson, of Sandwich, Massachusetts, buys eco-friendly cleaning products and recycles plastic bottles. Her daughter, Emma, said she likes to help the environment and is interested in recycled clothing.
“If it looks the same, and it is better for the environment, I would want to buy it,” said Emma, who likes to shop at Macy’s, Justice and Old Navy.
Many retailers are recycling. At Nike, 71 percent of its footwear and clothing contains recycled materials, and it says more than 31 million pairs of used shoes and 36,000 tons of rubber and foam have been reborn into high-performance products since 2010.
H&M, which is offering jeans this fall made from recycled fabric, says more than 26 percent of its clothing comes from sustainable sources like organic cotton or recycled materials like leather and denim. By 2030, the goal is for all its products to be eco-friendly, the company said.
People’s style and quality expectations put pressure on retailers to keep prices the same, even though manufacturing through the recycling process can be more expensive.
C. Britt Beemer, chairman of America’s Research Group, said 38 percent of 1,000 millennial shoppers polled in April said they would “respond positively” to environmentally friendly products. But they would spend, on average, just 3 percent more. Another survey by Deloitte Services found that parents of schoolage children would spend no more than 4 percent extra on “green” products for the back-to-school shopping season.
H&M’s jeans of recycled fabrics are priced from $29.99 to $49.99, the same range as its regular jeans.
But recycling plastic bottles into fiber is more costly. Unifi Inc.’s Repreve business, which works with 250 companies including Target, Roxy and Fossil, says the recycled fiber sells at a 25 percent to 30 percent premium to non-recycled fiber.
A pair of men’s dress pants or jeans can use up to six plastic bottles, said Jay Hertwig, vice president of global brand sales, marketing and product development. The added cost comes from the collection, cleaning and converting to flakes and then to recycled polymer chips, Hertwig said.
Marketing the green products can be tricky.
Target uses tags that say “Responsible Style” and “Better for All.” It also provides information including how much of the fabric content incorporates Repreve, which varies from 20 percent to 90 percent. During the back-to-school season, store signs will better highlight the Cat & Jack products that use Repreve. Cat & Jack pieces that include Repreve are sold at the same price as the rest of the collection.
“It’s not terribly overt,” said Joshua Thomas, a Target spokesman. “We’re not trying to pat ourselves on the back. What we try to do is provide awareness of what goes into the garment.”