H&M sets bar high for sustainability
09/04/2015
It is the number one user of organic cotton - certified organic cotton, Better Cotton or recycled cotton represented 13.7% of total cotton use – and it says by the end of the year, wherever possible, it will only use renewable energy (80% of total use).
For its artificial leather products, it worked with Bayer Material Science on a new water-based PU. “The results were very promising. Moving forward, our goal is to scale up the use of water-based PU materials to over ten products, including bags and shoes.”
It has increased transparency by adding second tier suppliers to a public supplier list, and looked at wage reform in supplier factories.
“We started to test the Fair Wage Method, developed by the independent Fair Wage Network, in three role model factories. Although it’s still early in the process, the initial results from the first factory that's been evaluated are promising. Based on these learnings, we aim to scale this up to all our strategic suppliers by 2018 at the latest,” said Karl-Johan Persson, CEO at H&M.
However, the wage scheme was criticised by the Clean Clothes Campaign as being only implemented in group-owned factories. Spokesperson Carin Leffler said: “Factories where buyers have this level of direct power don’t exist in 99% of the global garment industry, so H&M is unlikely to be able to upscale their ‘learning’. Any kind of credible wage pilot project needs to have defined benchmarks and include clear and time-bound plans for making progress happen in all factories, not just the few."
The full report is available on its website.
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