Companies are increasing their efforts in making their products more sustainable. Some examples of the rising environmental efforts include reducing the usage of plastic bags, encouraging people to use their own recycled bags and switching to green energy.
An example of a company that promotes environment sustainability is Swedish retailer H&M. In 2013, H&M started an initiative for people to drop off and donate their unwanted or unused fabrics and clothes (of any condition) at their stores in exchange for a voucher. It is estimated that up to 95% of clothing thrown away can be re-purposed or reused in one form or another. Clothes collected at H&M outlets will be then sorted and categorised as either re-wearable to sell in secondhand stores, reused as cloths, or recycled to make new fabric.
Since the revolution began in 2013, H&M has thus far helped recycled 28,000 tons of unwanted clothes. H&M came up with its permanent Conscious collection, made using recycled and sustainable materials such as organic cotton and recycled cotton.
However, there are limitations in ensuring sustainability of these products. The nature of fabrics make it extremely difficult to recycle blended material - thus this limits the variety of fabric that can be recycled. Out of the fabric that are recyclable like cotton, the quality of cotton reduces with wear. This affects the durability and quality of the clothing, especially if a piece has been worn and used consistently overtime. This makes it difficult for an entire item of clothing to be 100% recycled material. In addition, since the process of recycling fabric is still lagging behind in terms of technology, it is estimated that it would take H&M 12 years just to recycle 1,000 tons of clothing waste. Thus, results of today's effort would only be felt in the future. Since people are not able instantly see the direct effects of recycling and re-purposing old clothes, this may deter them from actually contributing and putting in effort to reduce environmental wastage of resources.
There is also an issue on H&M's production processes when manufacturing its clothes. Being one of the world's largest retailer of clothes, H&M produces a massive pile of clothes per day. This process - sourcing and growing of raw materials, dyeing the fabric and shipping the finished goods, puts a large strain on the environment. For the amount of effort it takes to recycle clothing, recycled fabric only takes up 1% of total materials H&M used in 2015.
This could suggest that although H&M may have genuine intents to encourage environmental awareness and promote corporate social responsibility, is using such ways as a marketing tool to increase their overall sales. By providing consumers with cash vouchers when they make a donation, people are more inclined to purchase H&M's products (although they might not have been loyal customers in the past). Hence, this increases H&M's profitability as a small cash discount can potentially increase H&M's sales immensely. When presented with a cash voucher, this encourages people to buy things they may not necessarily need or even want. This can hinder sustainability efforts as these cash vouchers are essentially encouraging people to buy more clothes and products - many of which they may not fully utilise.
References:
http://qz.com/662031/is-hm-misleading-customers-with-all-its-talk-of-sustainability/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/fashion/brands/hm-is-using-5-vouchers-to-become-more-sustainable-will-it-work/
http://www.womenshealthmag.com/style/hm-old-clothes-donation
http://www.herworldplus.com/fashion/updates/hm-launch-clothing-recycling-initiative
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