While Higg’s offerings include a module that collects data from and rates factories, its Material Sustainability Index has been the most controversial.
So the SAC came up with the Higg Index, a suite of tools that collects data on the fashion industry’s supply chain and rates it for sustainability. Multiply that by a dozen materials for a more complicated product and again by 25,000 - for the number of products H&M puts up on its website a year - and you get an idea of the scale of data collection required. For even the simplest products - a cotton T-shirt, for example - environmental impacts include the growth and harvesting of cotton the chemicals used to scour, bleach, dye it, and finish it, and whether the dye house treats its wastewater the electricity and coal-fired boilers at the factories and the transportation of it all over the globe. It turns out to be a very complicated question to answer. One of the SAC’s goals was to come up with a way to measure the impacts of a product, then put that on a label for shoppers so we could make better choices. 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 established to answer that question. The problem with the lawsuit stems from a larger question the fashion industry is not ready to answer: What actually makes a piece of fashion sustainable? A lot of the “certified organic” cotton is fake, and fossil-fuel-based textiles continue to dominate. Textile-to-textile recycling barely exists, and what the industry calls “recycling” is mostly downcycling to lower-value products and shipping clothing around the world to low-income countries, where a large portion of it ends up in the landfill. The fashion industry has not meaningfully reduced its carbon footprint ( it hasn’t even really measured it). In reality, the big brands have accomplished very little. They include using vague language like “close the loop” and “a conscious choice,” calling products “sustainable” even though they use fossil-fuel-based synthetics that shed plastic microfibers, taking back old clothes for recycling only to induce customers to buy more, and - most important for this suit - exploiting our collective climate guilt to charge us more for same-quality clothes. In the U.K., the Competition and Markets Authority is investigating ASOS and Boohoo for greenwashing because of their vague claims.Īlthough the lawsuit has to do with the price of the piece, the accusations in the suit read like a greatest hits of all the criticisms of the global fashion industry and its broken promises to reform. But a June investigation by Quartz showed that its new environmental scorecards for products were misleading. Sure, H&M is consistently top ranked when it comes to transparency, and it’s more fastidious than most about documenting in hard numbers its efforts at reducing its climate footprint. And the lawsuit is the culmination of a decade of fierce global debate. H&M is just one example of many fashion companies that profit from claiming that certain pieces of clothing are sustainable. Sustainability as a marketing tactic could go extinct. This lawsuit could be a watershed (sorry) moment for fashion.
H&M claims the discrepancy was the result of technical issues. In fact, she claims, several pieces of the brand’s Conscious Collection products were advertised as using less water to manufacture when they actually use more. The lawsuit was brought forward by Chelsea Commodore, a SUNY New Paltz marketing student who alleged she had overpaid for a fashion piece marketed as “conscious” that really … wasn’t. Last month, a lawsuit was filed against Swedish fast-fashion giant H&M in New York federal court, accusing it of it “greenwashing,” or engaging in false advertising about the sustainability of its clothing. Photo-Illustration: The Cut Photo: Getty Images
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