3 ways H&M is improving its footprint — and the hurdles that remain

Key takeaways:

• In a fast-moving, high-volume industry, H&M offers a rare level of transparency about sustainability progress.
• The company’s circularity efforts are growing but remain marginal.
• Despite progress in reducing supplier emissions, the road ahead remains challenging.

H&M Group has increasingly positioned its brand, for better or worse, around ambitions to reduce its burden on nature. The organization’s efforts include investing in circularity and driving down emissions across its thousands of suppliers and 4,000-plus retail stores. H&M’s 2024 sustainability report revealed the tensions between its latest achievements and the work that remains.

In this era of hyper-fast fashion, H&M — with its quest for sustainability and relative transparency — provide a foil to upstarts such as Shein of Singapore, which ship polyester clothes at disposable prices straight to consumers and create astounding amounts of waste. Stockholm-based Hennes Mauritz, founded 1947, is one of few apparel giants that has shared a detailed climate transition plan detailing near-term steps toward its science-based, net zero target for 2040.

“We aim to use our power, scale and knowledge to push the fashion industry towards agreeing and acting on fashion being produced within planetary boundaries, to harm no-one in creating our goods, and to empower our customers,” the company stated in its latest sustainability report on March 27. In those 35 pages, H&M explained how it has worked to decarbonize its supply chain, adopt “sustainably sourced” materials, and scale circular business processes.

Here, according to veteran apparel industry sustainability experts, are three major insights from H&M’s 2024 report — with the relevant caveats:

1. Supplier emissions are dropping — but next steps look tricky

“What stood out was their long-term goal to shift to 100 percent renewable energy with phasing out on-site coal in the immediate future for Tiers 1, 2, and 3 including spinning to the finished project,” said New York-based Chana Rosenthal, founder and principal of reDesign Consulting. “Their efforts to decarbonize are proving beneficial by their reduction in emissions thus far.”

In 2024, H&M shaved down its Scope 3 CO2 emissions by 24 percent compared with 2019 levels. Most reductions came from changing suppliers’ manufacturing practices and energy usage.

“H&M’s considerable investment in sustainability is laudable and their report is edifying,” said Ken Pucker, a senior business lecturer at Tufts University and advisory director at Berkshire Partners.

In two years, the company whittled down the number of coal fired boilers in its Tier 1 and 2 suppliers’ plants from 118 to 27. By 2026, it aims for zero. For example, among H&M’s efforts to encourage its mills to drop coal, it invested in Rondo Energy’s thermal brick batteries for suppliers’ plants.

For the first time, H&M was able to count the 12 Tier 3 operations using coal.

That said, the company grew Scope 3 emissions by 3 percent in 2024, due to a rise in overall material weight and a slight uptick in shipping by air.

Indeed, H&M may struggle to reach its aspiration to reduce climate emissions overall by 56 percent 2030, according to Pucker. That target would require 10 percent reductions of carbon each year and no revenue growth, he added.

At the same time, the company’s level of ambitions and disclosures lead those of most peers. For instance, alongside Patagonia, ASICS and Marks & Spencer, H&M is one of only four brands keeping emissions targets in line with United Nations goals of 55 percent reductions by 2030 over a 2018 baseline, according to a Fashion Revolution 2024 report. Behind Puma and Gucci, H&M scored among the top three brands on that “What Fuels Fashion” report.

In addition, H&M updates a public spreadsheet of suppliers every month, detailing more than 6,100 companies from Albania to Vietnam. Some 570 are Tier 1 product suppliers and the rest include fabric producers, tanneries, and dyeing operations. Yet the brand doesn’t similarly identify Scope 3 suppliers, which include materials manufacturing, transportation and other activities.

In 2024, the company invested about $170 million (kr 1.7 billion) in value chain decarbonization. Most of that went to using alternatives to virgin materials, as well as reducing fossil fuels and boosting energy efficiency.

2. Circular business is growing — but only to a point

“Fashion is full of glossy promises,” sustainable fashion expert Anna Blom, of Stockholm, posted on LinkedIn. “This time, we’ve got numbers.” For example, resale and other circular business models doubled in 2024 to 0.6 percent of sales, over .3 percent in 2022.

However, experts agreed that this represents an incredibly small slice of overall revenues. Lauren Fay, a Seattle fashion consultant and founder of BFG Lab, suggested creating a new role, such as “a Chief Returns Officer, to help connect their product team with their returns data for better design.”

Less than 1 percent of H&M’s stores stock resale items, but that has tripled since 2022. In 2023, the brand teamed up with resale platform ThredUp to list secondhand items there.

The promised gains from circularity have not materialized, according to Pucker of Tufts.

Yet Blom found more to encourage. “The signs of decoupling growth from resource use are there, she wrote. “Emissions rose by 3 percent, while material volume increased by 8 percent.”

In 2024, H&M disclosed that it created 524,739 metric tons of products. Although that’s up slightly from the 2023, it’s down from 561,087 metric tons in 2022.

The company spotlighted the use of consumer insights, artificial intelligence, digital product creation to optimize planning and balance production with potential demand, reducing waste across the supply chain.

3. Recycling ambitions are big — but so are synthetics

Toward its 2030 goal of using fully “recycled or sustainably sourced” materials in its styles, H&M reached 89 percent in 2024. Nearly 30 percent of that was recycled, toward a 2030 goal of 50 percent.

Helping that progress was sourcing more polyester from recycled sources. The brand used 94 percent recycled polyester in 2024, closing in on the 100 percent goal for 2025.

But Rosenthal pointed out that this count does not include component materials, such as linings, fill and pocketing. “By including all materials in the production of their product, it would perhaps improve their turnover for circular business models aiding in the product feasibility for recycling,” she said.

“H&M is pulling many levers to start moving towards circularity,” according to Tamera Manzanares, manager of water and company network communications for the nonprofit Ceres, based in Boston. She cited a collaboration with the Circular Design Consortium as an example.

“The potential impact of those efforts, however, will not be realized until the industry solves its core challenge of scaling post-consumer textile-to-textile recycling,” she said. “Notably, H&M is partnering with Infinited Fiber Company and Ambercycle to address that challenge, and Ceres would hope to see H&M and other fashion brands doubling down on efforts to scale systemic solutions for textile reclamation and recycling as a core activity to enable circularity.”

For the past year, H&M has backed a new chemical recycling venture, Syre by committing to $600 million of eventual purchases of circular polyester. The startup is scheduled to open a plant in North Carolina this fall.

But the infrastructure for recycling industrial amounts of textiles isn’t up and running yet, noted BFG Lab founder Fay. Recyclers vying to manage synthetic fiber blends are still relatively young. “Also,” she asked, “with the threat that microfibers pose to our crops and our health, are we holistically considering whether producing mostly recycled fibers is a good idea?”

Although polyester accounts for 22 percent of H&M’s materials, it uses more natural fibers; 55 percent of its products use cotton, and H&M has taken steps to boost alternative sources of cotton, such as by investing in lab-grown cotton startup Galy.

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