Closed loop manufacturing has become an increasing focus of Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives and McDonald’s are leading the way. It’s no surprise that uniforms that are related to the London Olympics have been under scrutiny for their environmental impacts, and that high profile companies are keen to ensure their promotional activities are in line with the latest social and environmental guidelines.

Many organisations, from Marks & Spencer to the National Grid, are looking into producing closed-loop clothing, whereby some of the polyester in the original garment is broken down into a polymer that can then be respun into a yarn that is rewoven into new clothing.

A London based consultancy, Worn Again, is helping other corporations to repurpose their corporate clothing into new items. For example, the old Eurostar headrests were repurposed into bags and utility pouches for Eurostar train managers, Royal Mail winter jackets have also been recycled into bags. It’s claimed that 33.4 million uniforms are purchased each year, of which something less than 5% are recycled.

The key messages here are:

1. Look at corporate clothing through its entire lifetime and plan an end-of-life use that can be a good story for the corporation.
2. Set up clothing collection systems in the workplace to gather corporate clothing for re-cycling or closed-loop processing.
3. Re-use, repurpose and recycle any workplace clothing that can’t be built into a closed loop process, and ensure that embroidery or printing can contribute to the repurposing by have logos printed in areas that can then be re-used to make smaller, ‘ready-branded’ items.

Recent case studies have shown what we all suspected – the logo is king. But why?

Partly it’s because a logo, emblem or monogram is not language specific. The ‘golden arches’ appear around the world, and have become so ubiquitous that some people don’t realise they are the capital M in McDonalds! Partly the success of logos is down to human nature – over 74% of people find it easier to process images than sounds or words, and that means an immediately identifiable image that relates to your business creates and confirms brand identity every time it is seen.

Clothing is another corporate identity success story – we can all identify airline staff, chefs, and policemen by their clothing, but did you know that most people can also identify over forty individual corporations from the clothing worn by their staff? Whether it’s the UPS guy or the KwikFit fitter, we have an innate ability to learn corporate clothing details and retain them. Amazingly, people can spot the difference between an RAC and an AA staff member at nearly forty yards, on the motorway, at night. And it’s not the colour of their high visibility clothing that people recognise, because asked to say which company wears orange and which wears yellow, most people have no idea. And that suggests that the emblem of each organisation, even at a distance, is instantly recognisable.

What’s also interesting is that people can identify brands very fast even when they are very small emblems on polo-shirts or even simply monograms on a shirt front. We seem hard-wired for this kind of behaviour and that’s good news for companies hoping to build a brand presence because as well as appearing on clothing, the logo should appear on both internal and outgoing material, intranets, websites and emails.