Our Conscious Actions

To encourage our customers to take part in this initiative, we offered an H&M gift voucher for each bag of clothes brought to our stores. We plan to extend this project to all our stores in Switzerland and evaluate opportunities to extend this also to other countries.

hm.com/recycling
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Some stores use the recycling facilities offered by shopping centres or landlords and others have separate waste contracts, or return waste to our distribution centres. This broad variation of circumstances poses a challenge to implementing a consistent Groupwide approach. Our general requirement is that all waste should be reused or recycled, such as transport packaging and hangers. In order to have better knowledge and control over our waste impacts at a Group level, we are currently developing a global waste strategy. As part of this, we are working towards improved reporting on relevant waste indicators.

hm.com/recycling

This showed that recycled plastic is the best available choice, with lower environmental impacts than paper. That is why we have switched to a recycled material for all of our standard plastic consumer bags. Since 2010, they have been made from 50% post-consumer and 50% pre-consumer recycled polyethylene (PE). This change has led to estimated savings in CO2-e emissions of approximately 34% relative to conventional plastic.

hm.com/carrierbags

Recycled polyester is often made of PET plastic bottles. The amount that we used in 2011, equates to more than 9.2 million such bottles. While further innovations will be needed to help recycled materials play a bigger commercial role, we believe that we can support this process by driving demand and thereby encouraging further innovations.

hm.com/consciousmaterials

When we send the garments from our distribution centres to our stores, we use reusable transport boxes instead of cartons. This makes savings of more than 400,000 trees possible compared with using new, conventionally made cardboard boxes for each delivery. We also work to minimise the use of single garment packaging when transporting products from our suppliers to our distribution centres. By 2011, we managed to minimise the use of such packaging to almost zero.

Much of this, however, can be recycled and in many cases this can lead to cost reductions. To make sure that we make the best of these opportunities throughout our operations, we have developed further guidance for all our sales countries. We have also started to demand recycling reports for our construction projects.