H&M and Waste Colonialism: Polluting the World with “Dead White Men’s Clothes”
The fashion industry is responsible for 10% of global carbon emissions. This is more than all international flights and shipping combined. Yet, year after year, leading fast fashion chains fail to acknowledge and take responsibility for these statistics. H&M is currently the world’s second-biggest fashion retailer and one of many companies in the industry that are trying to curb their carbon footprint. The “Let’s close the loop” initiative is an attempt by H&M to prevent clothes from ending up in landfills by encouraging consumers to hand in their old garments to their recycling boxes. H&M then promises to reuse or recycle all garments. However, recent investigations have revealed a contrasting and quite shocking reality…
Background
H&M is no stranger to being in the crossfire for its negative environmental impact (or other scandals for that matter). Despite this, the company has managed to successfully redirect attention towards its seemingly impactful environmental strategies. Some of these attempts involve reducing single-use packaging, launching the Conscious Collection (that is a totally different story, read more here), and fostering circular fashion through the Garment Collecting program. On their website, H&M states that they are striving towards becoming 100% circular and renewable. Their goal is to halve emissions by 2023 and reach net-zero impact by 2040.
Recycle, reuse, or rubbish?
As a part of their sustainability (greenwashing?) strategy, H&M launched their Garment Collecting program in 2013. The purpose of this program is to recycle unwanted clothes and promote a circular fashion model. By allowing their consumers to hand in old garments to their in-store recycling boxes, the company guarantees that all clothes will either be sold as second-hand, reused, or recycled into new materials. Together with their recent business partner, and German recycling group, Remondis (before them, H&M collaborated with the company I:Collect), the fashion chain can ensure a “sustainable” product chain.
If you ask H&M, their Garment Collecting program has proven to be very successful. According to their annual report, H&M collected 14,768 tonnes of used clothes last year. 70% of these were reused, 22% recycled, and the remaining 8% had to be disposed of. However, if you look at recent reports, they reveal a different story.
The shocking unveil
In January 2023, two Swedish reporters decided to hand in ten H&M garments to one of the chain’s many collection boxes in Sweden. To explore what actually happens with the clothes, they equipped all garments with Bluetooth-driven air tags to be able to trace their journey.
After five months of intense tracking, none of the garments had ended up at any of their partner’s sorting stations or recycling facilities, as promised by H&M. Instead, several garments had managed to travel across the globe, ending up in landfills in countries such as Ghana and Benin. These are known as some of the worst dumping grounds in the world. In Ghana alone, a total of 314 000 kilos of clothes, approximately over one million garments, have been dumped by H&M’s partners this year.
Waste Colonialism
One of the garments, a striped jacket, made its way from Sweden to the city of Cotonou, in Benin. Here, the locals refer to such second-hand apparel as “Dead white men’s clothes”. It’s believed that the previous owners must have passed away which explains why they want to get rid of everything. Each year, approximately 92 million tonnes of clothes end up in landfills. These open-air dumps pose a great threat to the environment since they pollute the air, water, and land in the local communities, releasing harmful greenhouse gases.
What H&M is currently doing is known as Waste Colonialism. This is when a group of people uses waste and pollution to dominate another group of people in their homeland. The term was coined back in 1989 when growing concerns were expressed about the dumping of toxic waste by high GDP counties into low GPD countries. By sending our waste to countries with fewer resources, H&M manages to successfully push the pollution problem out of sight and out of mind from the Western world.
What does H&M have to say about this?
Following the publication of the investigation, questions were directed to Helena Helmersson, CEO of H&M. Helmersson denies the findings and insists that their partner’s traceability of the items is more trustworthy than those independently made by the journalists.
“We also have traceability on the garments and where they have gone from our partners. So that’s why I know. We know which countries they have gone to, we know which partners they have in turn gone to. And that they have gone to recycling and reuse”, she says.
Although the new findings are repeated to her face-to-face, Helmersson avoids answering the question, pointing towards unreliable data. Based on my limited knowledge of crisis management, I can already draw the conclusion that this was perhaps not the best approach to adopt.
Solving the fashion industry’s problem
Currently, the EU is implementing a new strategy for sustainable and circular textiles. This strategy attempts to hold actors such as H&M more accountable for their waste management. It also aims to tackle corporate greenwashing and stop overproduction and overconsumption.
Meanwhile, textile exports like those from H&M continue to thrive, leaving poorer countries such as Benin under-compensated and overpowered by toxic textile waste. If fast fashion giants like H&M refuse to act faster (or at all), it is left up to us consumers to take a stance. We need to reject the notion that “new is better” which has been imprinted in us for generations since the industrialization and adopt more of a “fast fashion is out of fashion” mentality. By boycotting fast fashion brands such as H&M, we can make the biggest impact. We can also support important initiatives such as #STOPWASTECOLONIALISM and sign their petition here.
But don’t forget, while we continue to fall victim to the latest 3 for 2 deals, markets on the other side of the globe continue to drown in the leftovers of our fast-fashion consumption.
