#Sustainability

2023-01-19

Inditex renews its support for Caritas’ clothing reuse and workplace inclusion drive in Spain, pledging €8.5 million

Inditex’s CEO, Óscar García Maceiras, and the president of Caritas in Spain, Manuel Bretón Romero, officially extended the two organisations’ collaboration until 2025 this morning in Madrid © 2023 Inditex

Inditex will contribute €8.5 million to Caritas during the next three years to reinforce its clothing collection and reuse initiative, known as Moda Re-, and continue to fund upskilling, training and inclusion projects for people in need in Spain. Óscar García Maceiras, CEO of Inditex, and Manuel Bretón Romero, president of Caritas in Spain, signed a new agreement this morning in Madrid, extending the collaboration between the two entities, which dates back to 2007, until 2025.

The Moda Re- programme, to which Inditex will earmark €3.5 million out of the €8.5 million pledged under the agreement, is Caritas’ community project devoted to the full-cycle management (collection, reuse via donation or charitable sale and recycling) of using clothing, an activity that has enabled the NGO to create 1,200 jobs, half of which inclusion-driven.

Between 2023 and 2025, the money donated by Inditex to the Moda Re- scheme will mainly go to reinforcing clothing collection capacity and the related traceability systems and expanding its 129-store chain of charity shops with new openings. In order to give new life to any products collected that cannot be reused, Moda Re- will continue to innovate at its textile processing facilities in Bilbao, Barcelona and Valencia, where it extracts fibres and raw materials of value for the industry.

Caritas’ employment and training programme, meanwhile, will receive €5 million of funding to continue to carry out projects that provide labour skills to vulnerable people at risk of social exclusion and those left behind in order to increase their chances of inclusion. With that money, Caritas will also roll out social economy and selfemployment initiatives.

Since 2007, the year it began to work with Caritas, Inditex has donated over €32 million to the NGO’s humanitarian aid and emergency, international cooperation and community work projects in Spain. During today’s signing ceremony, Manuel Bretón, Caritas’ president in Spain, underscored that “Inditex’s support will allow us to articulate proposals for social transformation that shape a society based on respect for human rights, dignity, cooperation and justice, all framed by care for our planet”.

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