
The fast fashion brands are unduly greenwashing the consumers with various marketing techniques and campaigns on the go green. According to the data on h&m's website (h&m, 2022), it adheres to all the UN ground rules of sustainability, the internal organisation adheres to it, and its suppliers need to agree to the agreement on it beforehand.
The various agreements that h&m has are migrant workers' rights, human rights policies, child labour act, sustainability acts and many more along similar lines, which were recently updated in March 2022 (h&m, 2022). Whereas the recent research reports say that the brand's employees are exploited, the women and girls working as workers are abused, and there are no healthy working conditions for the workers.
There is a conflict between what policies H&M as a brand adheres to and what is happening in reality. The conflict leads to more powerful queries on how these brands and suppliers coordinate together. According to (h&m, 2022), one of the agreements says that at least one of the internal employees is engaged in the supplier's office to
ensure everything is running good, but there is no evidence of how satisfactorily the audits go in the supplier's office.
According to (h&m, 2022) policies, every worker recruited by suppliers must be informed about the policies on human rights, migrant workers policies and whichever is relevant to their work status. However, there is no evidence of how the supplier has recruited the workers and how H&M traces the ethnicity of the process. The policy law changes between demographics, which may mislead the consumers on the policies that H&M as brand updates on their website every year. The fashion supply chain is huge and tracing the ethnicity of the brand’s policies becomes much harder.
(h&m, 2022) has a whistle-blowing policy for the internal employees of H&M and consumers where the internal employees can report any issues or malpractices in the organisation. They have also launched a reporting channel called www.speakup.hmgroup.com (h&m, 2022). This shows how sounder H&M treats its employees, but the truth is that this is not for all the employees involved across the supply chain.
The H&M workers who work through suppliers do not have a platform where they can report the issues they go through, and almost none of H&M's supply chain is certified by any of the labour standards that ensure workers' safety and health. Many brands burn off their excess or unsold products to keep their brand image. Many luxury brands are involved in this act to protect their brand image and products from replications and grey markets. Nearly 30% of most fashion brands' products are never sold and end up burnt.
In some countries, the brands benefit from burning the products as they can recover 99% of the taxes and customs paid in the process of drawback. In the end, burning unsold products will be much cheaper than spending money to recycle or reproduce them. Ultimately, fast fashion brands are getting benefited at the cost of the environment. A study says energy recoupled by burning goods is often nearly insufficient to balance the energy required to produce garments in the first place.
Even though clothes are not burnt and left to be sent to landfills, the amount of methane produced from landfills is the third largest source of methane in the US. The major brands involved in this act are H&M and Burberry, and the primary reason is overproduction/fast production.