Environmental Impact
Social Impact
Quality of Clothing
H&M offers a ‘Conscious’ collection, but we recommend investing your hard-earned dollars in clothes that are not only ethical and sustainable but are also timeless in style, will last you a lifetime, and are made by brands that are designed to be sustainable and ethical from the ground up.
The company has shown a few improvements regarding worker empowerment initiatives, auditing and supplier relationships. H&M received an overall grade of ‘B+’ in the 2017 Ethical Fashion Report, the same as their 2016 grade. Disconcertingly, the report shows that H&M has taken a few steps backwards over the past year when it comes to the traceability and transparency of their suppliers.
H&M is taking a few positive steps to reduce their environmental impact, yet there is room for improvement. H&M is a member of the Better Cotton Initiative, offers a recycling program where you can return clothes from any brand in-store, and as we’ve seen, it has set some positive targets in its 2016 Sustainability Report, even if these targets are nearly 20 years away. It uses renewable energy for part of its supply chain and aims to eliminate hazardous chemicals and solvent-based glues in the manufacturing of its products by 2020. On the other hand, the majority of the materials it uses are not eco-friendly. The brand still operates under an unsustainable, fast-fashion model.
Somewhere between 1% and 25% of traced facilities across H&M’s supply chain pay a living wage to their workers. On another bad note, H&M only implements some of the available worker empowerment initiatives at the final manufacturing stage and even fewer at the raw materials and inputs stages of production.
Environmental Impact
Social Impact
Quality of Clothing
Overall we rate H&M ‘It’s A Start’ based on information from the 2017 Ethical Fashion Report and our own research. Despite the fact that H&M is setting sustainability targets and has adopted some positive practices and policies across the board, it is still the world’s second biggest producer of fashion products designed to be worn just a few times and then discarded.
At the end of the day, H&M is still very much a part of the unsustainable fast fashion industry. Its promotion of ‘disposable’ fashion and constant rotations of new trends and products has a huge environmental impact. An increasing amount of cheap clothing ends up in landfill after a few wears due to these reasons.
Like other parts of the clothing industry, the manufacturing process regularly involves the use of toxic dyes, solvents and pesticides, is responsible for significant carbon emissions and uses much of the world’s fresh water and land resources. While this is an industry wide problem, there are more clothes pumped through the system by the fast fashion brands –and it’s not clear the sustainability initiatives of H&M are enough to compensate.