Sustainability continues to be a hot topic in the fashion industry, both in ads and in lawsuits related to those ads. Last month, a plaintiff filed a proposed class action against H&M arguing that the company makes various false claims about the sustainability of its products. The lawsuit seems to be prompted by a June 28, 2022 article published in Quartz with the results of an investigation which allegedly demonstrated that “H&M showed customers environmental scorecards for its clothing that were misleading and, in many cases, outright deceptive.”
Leaning on the Quartz article, the complaint alleges that the company “conveniently and egregiously” presented negative results as positive ones in its scorecards. For example, one scorecard claimed that a dress “was made with 20% less water on average,” when Quartz determined that the dress “was actually made with 20% more water.” The plaintiff claims that “a majority” of the products that H&M markets as being sustainably-made are actually “no more sustainable than items in [its] main collection, which are also not sustainable.”
(H&M removed the scorecards, which were based on the Higg MSI calculations, shortly after Quartz published the article. Facing scrutiny over its use of Higg MSI, the Sustainable Apparel Coalition also announced that it was pausing the use of the tool, pending further investigation. Critics who think that Higg MSI doesn’t measure enough of a product’s lifecycle are happy with that...
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