The Swedish fashion retailer H&M has recently revealed its sustainability report – the Conscious Actions Sustainability Report 2014, which highlights eco-friendly practices in its supply chain and stores to reduce harmful effects on the environment. It also showcases the retailer’s efforts on a variety of social welfare issues such as gender equality and poverty alleviation. The report reveals the retailer’s expansion of the public supplier factory list, the determination to use only renewable electricity and the increase of the quantity of products made of recycled cotton from collected garments by 300 per cent.
Continuously, H&M is working towards fair living wages and seeing some positive development. “We started to test the so-called 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,” informs Karl-Johan Persson, CEO, H&M in the report.
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Since last year, H&M has more than doubled the amount of collected garments with the garment collective initiative. In total, more than 13,000 tonnes of textiles have been collected, which is equivalent to 65 million T-shirts. Going forward, the retailer aims to increase the amount of products made of recycled fibres by at least 300 per cent by the end of 2015.
