Why H&M’s Greenwashing box is important to fashion

Last month, a lawsuit was filed against Swedish fast-fashion giant H&M in New York federal court, accusing it of “greenwashing,” or engaging in false advertising about the sustainability of its clothing. The lawsuit was filed by Chelsea Commodore, a marketing student at SUNY New Paltz, who claimed she overpaid for a piece of fashion sold as “conscious” that actually … wasn’t. In fact, she claims, some of the brand’s Conscious Collection products were advertised as using less water to produce, when they actually use more. H&M claims the discrepancy was the result of technical issues.

This lawsuit could be a watershed moment for fashion. Sustainability as a marketing tactic may disappear. And maybe you should?

H&M is just one example of many fashion companies profiting from the claim that certain pieces of clothing are sustainable. And the lawsuit is the culmination of a decade of fierce global debate. Of course, H&M consistently ranks high when it comes to transparency and is harder than most to document in hard numbers its efforts to reduce its climate footprint. But a June investigation by Quartz showed that its new environmental credentials for products were misleading. This is happening globally. In the UK, the Competition and Markets Authority is investigating ASOS and Boohoo for greenwashing over their vague claims.

Although the lawsuit is about the price of the piece, the allegations in the lawsuit read as the biggest hits of all criticism of the global fashion industry and its broken promises of reform. They include using vague language like “close the loop” and “a conscious choice,” calling the products “sustainable” even though they use fossil fuel-based synthetics that throw away plastic microfibers, taking old clothes for recycling just to encourage customers to buy. more, and – most importantly for this suit – exploiting our collective climate guilt to make us pay more for clothes of the same quality.

In reality, the big brands have achieved very little. The fashion industry has not significantly reduced its carbon footprint (nor has it really measured it). Textile-to-textile recycling barely exists, and what the industry calls “recycling” is largely the reduction of lower-value products and the shipping of clothing around the world to low-income countries, where much of it ends up in landfill. Much of the “certified organic” cotton is fake, and fossil fuel-based textiles continue to dominate.

The problem with the lawsuit stems from a larger question the fashion industry is unwilling to answer: What actually makes a piece of fashion sustainable?

More than a decade ago, the Sustainable Apparel Coalition — whose membership now includes almost 150 retailers, from Amazon to Reformation, as well as factories and nonprofits — was created to answer that question. One of SAC’s goals was to come up with a way to measure the impacts of a product, then put it on a label for shoppers so we could make better choices.

It turns out to be a very complicated question to answer. Even for the simplest products—a cotton T-shirt, for example—the environmental impacts include growing and harvesting the cotton; the chemicals used to clean, bleach, dye and finish it, and whether the dyehouse treats its own wastewater; electric and coal-fired boilers in factories; and its transportation around the globe. Multiply that by a dozen materials for a more complex product, and again by 25,000—the number of products H&M puts on its website per year—and you get an idea of ​​the scale of data collection required.

So SAC came up with the Higg Index, a set of tools that collects data on the fashion industry’s supply chain and rates it for sustainability. While Higg’s offerings include a module that collects data from factories and scores, its Material Sustainability Index has been more controversial. It provides scorecards that show on the average how much water use, water pollution, fossil fuel use, chemical use and greenhouse gas emissions can be attributed to all types of materials, from leather to linen and PVC. (H&M chose to use this global average metric to support its environmental rating pilot project.)

But there are different opinions about what it is Actually stable. For example, PETA has used scorecards to argue that synthetics are more sustainable than animal products, which fur and leather trade groups didn’t like.

Natural materials advocates say the measurements don’t include things like synthetic microfibers, the length of time synthetic materials take to fully biodegrade (200 years, maybe?), or the fact that the ease of producing petroleum-free polyester has contributed in ever-increasing amounts of discarded fashion. Another criticism of the organization is that any global average for natural materials, which do not come from standardized factories but from wildly different farms around the world, will be inaccurate and misleading.

The organization would prefer that interest groups stop using it to compare completely different fibers. It says designers should use whatever material they want—for look, feel, and performance—and simply upgrade to a more sustainable organic or recycled version.

“If you’re pushing someone to buy a product based on those claims, that’s false advertising,” says Maxine Bédat, an author, fashion sustainability expert and co-creator of the proposed Fashion Sustainability and Social Responsibility Act. of New York State. She says Higg’s material averages should only have been used as a broad starting point, not as a marketing claim for a specific product.

Many people don’t think that a brand with H&M’s cheap and fast business model can ever be sustainable, no matter how much of its cotton is organic and recycled. Higg CEO Jason Kibbey counters this notion. “If you just try to make it exclusive so that the cool little boutique brands with cool young founders are the only ones that are sustainable, you’re not moving the needle,” he says.

Higg was created during a completely different era of “conscious capitalism,” when we thought that if we simply educated consumers, then they would vote with their dollars for a better world. Given how effective the calorie counts on the menu were (LOL), there’s not much reason to be confident in this. In fact, despite survey after survey in which consumers say they’d pay more for sustainable fashion, we rarely do. This lawsuit may just be the death knell for the vaunted “consumer education” theory of change.

Now, as the West Coast burns, the Loire River dries up, Kentucky drowns and plastic is part of the geological record, Higg and H&M both find themselves trapped in a thorny pile of anger and despair over whether we can ever repair the damage that overconsumption has caused on our planet.

“No, brands shouldn’t do that,” Bédat says of displaying fake stats on product pages. “And if it takes a lawsuit to stop them from doing that, then this is a powerful way to do it.” But, she points out, the practice of measuring carbon footprints for products is a new field. She and Kibbey share a concern that this lawsuit could halt what little progress the fashion industry has made toward measuring and reducing its environmental impacts. “I think we need to … highlight the things that need to change and change them,” she says. “But don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.”