Volunteers who were cleaning up the Wetahirakanda Nature Reserve, Uva-Kuda Oya, Thanamalwila have stumbled upon a patch of buried fabric labels bearing the name of leading global apparel brand, H&M.

Volunteers of the 'Climate Action Now Sri Lanka', a group which organizes regular cleaning-up activities across the country, organized a project to clean Tier IV of the Wetahirakanda Nature Reserve (WNR), on October 3. The particular stretch was chosen for the project as the area had been heavily littered.

The Colombo - Galle - Hambantota - Wellawaya Road or the A2 Highway cuts through a section of this nature reserve. Interestingly it is also an Elephant Corridor, wedged between the Lunugamwehera and the Uda Walawe National Parks.

“Several months ago, we heard from one of the team members about a section of Tier IV of WNR being highly polluted due to the trash that's being dumped there. So we organized a group of volunteers to go there on October 3 and managed to clean most of the waste and to send the recyclable waste for recycling,” the member said. “During the clean up, we came across a bunch of H&M labels in a specific location that was around 50 meters inside from the A2 Highway,” One volunteer said. “While collecting them, our volunteers realized there are so many of them around, in fact we realized that there were more where this came from, buried inside the ground.”

The volunteers claim they had collected thousands of H&M labels – two gunny sacks to be precise - from this location.They had managed to discard the labels along with the other non-recyclable waste found during the cleanup, with the help of several district officials.

How and why these sacks of labels ended up in a wilderness sanctuary is still a mystery. But sources believe that the labels may have originated from factory rejected garments and dumped at this site. 

The H&M group responding to the Daily Mirror's inquiry said that the company is investigating the isssue. "We take this extremely seriously and we are currently investigating how this could have happened and will make surr that the necessary steps are being taken," Katarina Hugo of H&M Group Communications said. (Kalani Kumarasinghe)