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 Photographer: Johan Jeppsson/Bloomberg Photographer: Johan Jeppsson/Bloomberg 
 
 Burning discarded clothing from retail chain Hennes & Mauritz AB is helping a Swedish power plant replace coal for good. 
 
 The combined heat and power station in Vasteras, northwest of Stockholm, is converting from oil- and coal-fired generation to become a fossil fuel-free facility by 2020. That means burning recycled wood and trash, including clothes H&M can’t sell. 
 
 “For us it’s a burnable material,” said Jens Neren, head of fuel supplies at Malarenergi AB, a utility which owns and operates the 54-year-old plant about 100 kilometers (62 miles) from Stockholm. “Our goal is to use only renewable and recycled fuels.” 
 
 While Sweden prides itself on an almost entirely emission free-power system thanks to its hydro, nuclear and wind plants, some local municipalities still use coal and oil to heat homes and offices during cold winter days. By converting old plants to burn biofuels and garbage, the biggest Nordic economy is hoping to edge out the last of its fossil fuel units by the end of this decade. 
 
 Malarenergi has a deal with the neighboring city of Eskilstuna to burn their trash, some of which comes from H&M’s central warehouse in the same city. The refuse wasn’t specified as clothing until it was highlighted in a Swedish national television program on Tuesday. 
 
 “H&M does not burn any clothes that are safe to use,” Johanna Dahl, head of communications for H&M in Sweden, said by email. “However it is our legal obligation to make sure that clothes that contain mold or do not comply with our strict restriction on chemicals are destroyed.” 
 
 The Vasteras plant burned about 15 tons of discarded clothes from H&M so far in 2017, compared with about 400,000 tons of trash, Neren said. Malarenergi has deals with several nearby cities to receive rubbish and even imports waste from Britain to fuel its main boiler. 
 
 The facility, which supplies power to about 150,000 households, burned as much as 650,000 tons of coal at its peak in 1996. 
 
 On Tuesday, the last coal ship docked in Vasteras to supply the plant’s two remaining fossil-fuel generators from the 1960s with enough supplies to last until 2020. That’s when a new wood-fired boiler will be added to supplement the facility’s existing biofuel and trash burning units. ||||| Nearly 100% of all used clothing and household textiles can be re-used or recycled: 45% are re-used as apparel; 30% are converted into industrial polishing/wiping cloths and 20% are processed into fiber to be manufactured into new products. 95% of all used clothing is recyclable, only 5% is unusable due to mildew or other contamination. 
 
 Companies in the textile reuse and recycling industry consist of collectors, processors and distributors of all types of used clothing, textiles and secondary materials. 
 
 Collectors are companies that collect used clothing and other household textiles from the public. In addition, recycled textile collectors gather materials from industrial laundries, healthcare institutions, hotels, and other businesses that utilize large amounts of textile products. Another source of textile products that is directed into the recycling stream by "collector" companies is textile waste from clothing manufacturers. 
 
 Collectors bale and sell these clothing products "as is" to clothing graders or other dealers. Used clothing "graders" sort the items assign a "grade" and re-sell the graded product. The activities of collectors, graders, and used clothing brokers are instrumental in diverting solid waste from landfills. 
 
 Processors sort, grade and reprocess used clothing and household textiles during the recycling process. At the facilities where the collected clothing and textiles are sorted, the items are then made into large bales to be re-sold. The newly created bales of used clothing may be re-sold within the United States, although most often the products are shipped overseas to developing markets in Asia, Africa, Europe, or Central and South America. 
 
 Textile processors also collect items from industrial laundries that are deemed to be unfit to be used by the laundry's clients. These items are sorted and bleached to make them more absorbent before they are cut into wiping cloths. 
 
 Some companies re-process used clothing back into their original fiber. These companies create blends of fiber that are sold in bales to companies that re-manufacture the fiber content into new products. These products include: home insulation (made from the denim of reprocessed blue jeans), stuffing for furniture, athletic equipment, pet bedding, automotive soundproofing, and carpet padding among many other new products. 
 
 Distributors take the used clothing or textiles that are cut or converted into wiping products and then sold to industrial, manufacturing, retail, and other end-use clients. Broker companies fall within the distributor category as well. These businesses facilitate the transactions between collector companies, grader companies and buyers. Materials that are brokered within the used clothing industry include institutional mixed used clothing, clothing gathered by collector companies and materials that have been sorted by grader companies. The clients of brokers are often foreign businesses located in Africa, Asia, Europe, or South America. On occasion, brokers also facilitate transactions among companies within the United States, depending on the needs of their client companies. ||||| A Swedish power plant that aims to eliminate the use of fossil fuels by 2020 has taken to burning recycled wood and garbage—including clothes from H&M;’s central warehouse, as first reported on Swedish public television. 
 
 “For us it’s a burnable material,” said Jens Neren, head of fuel supplies at Malarenergi AB, which owns and operates the plant in Vasteras, about 100 kilometers (62 miles) from Stockholm. “Our goal is to use only renewable and recycled fuels.” 
 
 According to Bloomberg, the plant has burned about 15 tons of discarded clothing from H&M; so far in 2017, making it a minuscule percentage of the 400,000 tons of trash it has burned to supply power to about 150,000 households. The clothes, according to H&M;’s head of communications, Johanna Dahl, are burned because they’re unsafe for wearing. 
 
 “It is our legal obligation to make sure that clothes that contain mold or do not comply with our strict restriction on chemicals are destroyed,” Dahl told Bloomberg.“H&M; does not burn any clothes that are safe to use.” 
 
 While Sweden is a leader in eliminating the use of fossil fuels, the fast fashion cycle encouraged by brands such as H&M; is far from sustainable, as 15 tons of discarded clothing from a single warehouse would indicate. 
 
 Beyond the staggering resources required to produce H&M;’s hundreds of millions of products globally each year, fast fashion encourages an environmentally catastrophic cycle that sees manufacturers producing ever-increasing quantities to meet rising demands in markets such as Brazil, China, India, Mexico, and Russia. According to a 2016 McKinsey study, clothing production worldwide doubled between 2010 and 2014, and from 2000 to 2011 the average number of annual collections produced by European apparel companies rose from two to five. 
 
 It’s a lot of material for one planet to handle. Plus, when clothes are so cheap, customers value them less, making them even likelier to end up in landfills—if they’re not in an incinerator first. 
 
 🌍 Quartz is running a series called The Race to Zero Emissions that addresses the challenges and opportunities of climate action. Sign up here to be the first to know when stories are published. ||||| What does it mean for textiles to get recycled? While almost half of donated clothing gets worn again, a large portion of it is recycled in the traditional sense—ground down and re-formed into things like insulation and carpet padding—and a slightly smaller portion is turned into industrial rags. 
 
 Figuring out the proper way to dispose of old clothes can be perplexing; if these bins were to be taken off the sidewalks, few people would know where to put their used clothing. On top of that, Americans still think of old clothes as charitable donations, which explains the outrage over news that the Viltex bins actually belong to a for-profit company. 
 
 Those in the textile-recycling industry are now trying to clear up the confusion. "What we need to do is change the dialogue to, 'You're not just donating, you're reusing and recycling,'" says Jackie King, executive director of the Secondhand Materials and Recycled Textiles Association, a trade group. "It's an issue of communicating that and getting people to understand that if they want to use a charitable organization to reuse or recycle clothing, great. If not, let's make it convenient for people to dispose of it elsewhere." 
 
 Most recycling, from bottles to cans to newspapers, is done by for-profit companies. In a nation that churns out an ungodly amount of waste, this amounts to big business. Take plastic: The U.S. exported more than $940 million worth of plastic scrap in 2010. The value of used clothing, moreover, has been in its own inflationary bubble since the recession, as more people are cash-strapped and opting to buy used. 
 
 Of course, castoff clothing differs from a bottle or a newspaper in that almost half of it can be reused as secondhand clothing; it needn't be ground down into a pulp to make a new product, as is the case with plastic or glass. But the other half—the ripped, the torn, the busted—is recyclable. 
 
 Charities have been our de facto national textile recyclers going back to the early 20th century, and Goodwill started providing bins for clothing donations as early as the 1940s. But this system was set up in a pre-consumerist America, when we had neither a landfill crunch nor a waste crisis: Americans now buy five times as much clothing as they did in 1980, according to Mattias Wallander, CEO of USAgain, a textile-recycling company. And between 1999 and 2009, the volume of textile trash rose by 40 percent. Particularly due to the advent of cheap, disposable clothing, charities have seen themselves transformed into dumps that accept clothes of varying condition in ever-increasing volumes. 
 
 King says there is quite a lot of public misinformation about what exactly happens to clothing when it’s donated to charities. "People think when they are giving to, say, a Salvation Army or Goodwill, that all of that is going to be resold in their stores, and it's just not, because they don't have enough room for that," she says. In fact, according to King, there's only a 15 or 20 percent chance that a piece of clothing you've donated is being worn by someone in your community, as charities receive far too many donations to sell them all.
– H&M's fashions are on fire—literally, that is, in Vasteras, Sweden. A heat and power station that powers 150,000 homes there has a mandate to stop burning fossil fuels like coal and oil by 2020. Its path to achieving that involves burning "only renewable and recycled fuels," which in its case, includes recycled wood and "trash" from an H&M warehouse in the neighboring city of Eskilstuna. Bloomberg reports it was only last week that the trash was specified as clothing, and a rep for H&M in Sweden explains the company "does not burn any clothes that are safe to use." What's being torched—year to date, about 30,000 pounds' worth—are ones that may "contain mold or do not comply with our strict restriction on chemicals." The alternative would seemingly be a landfill, which is where a staggering amount of our clothing ends up. The Atlantic in 2014 reported that Americans toss about 10.5 million tons of clothing a year. That's about 85% of what we get rid of, with the other 15% recycled—either ultimately worn by someone else, turned into industrial rags, or "ground down" and repurposed as items ranging from insulation and furniture stuffing to pet bedding, per the Secondary Materials and Recycled Textiles Association. The Sourcing Journal cites the Environmental Protection Agency's concern over the situation: The agency recorded a 38% jump in textile waste between 2000 and 2011. Quartz points to a 2016 McKinsey study that found that over that same period, European clothing companies increased their number of annual collections from two to five.