H&M: how does the fashion retailer's sustainability report stack up?

Unpicking H&M's sustainability report has become the spring activity for those interested in sustainable reform of the fashion industry. Consider it our equivalent to Fashion Week. Plus the bloggers get lovely pictures of the accompanying Conscious Collection of actual clothes – this time modelled by Vanessa Paradis. So sustainability gets a fresh new high street look and a face to put with the theory.

Those interested in the point where sustainability and the politics of limits intersect will shudder to hear that when H&M, the world's second biggest clothing retailer producing an estimated 550m garments per year, releases its conscious actions sustainability report for 2012, it also launches a 2013 Conscious Collection of yet more garments. So despite an understanding of all the pressures on Planet Earth sketched out in the report, there are no plans to scale back on ambition or indeed inventory: 42 new H&M stores will open this quarter, including entrance into five new markets and the company has launched an additional high-end line, Other Stories, and plans to "broaden its offering" even further with sports apparel from the 2014 Winter Olympics. "We constantly need to source new production capacity," it says with no particular sense of irony.

From the outset this tells me there's no truly radical shift to be found in these pages. No Patagonia, "We'd rather you didn't buy this product" campaign, no "dematerialisation" or ripping up of the fast fashion rule book (rule number one: high-volume, low price).

The report represents a sustainability smorgasbord. There's much on cotton, some material innovation, water saving, social justice and even women (50% of H&M board members are women).

Indeed, H&M's sustainability strategy covers a lot of ground. Depending on your stance you'll either see this mix as a full-spectrum response to a full-spectrum industry or a rather scatter gun approach when urgent action is needed on a couple of very specific points such as a living wage for garment workers.

H&M clearly has a dedicated sustainability team that has influence throughout the company (as opposed to being silo-ed or locked away somewhere) and this reaps dividends in terms of repositioning the brand as an industry leader in sustainability rather than just a huge purveyor of cheap clothes. There is a confidence that the consumer is interested in the ethics of fashion and actually has high expectations (H&M frequently surveys consumers about this). Many fashion brands could learn from this.

There are also some highly implausible and chewy moments. According to his introduction, CEO Karl-Johan Persson strongly believes "that sustainability will more and more become a hygiene factor in our industry". I'm not a huge fan of this jargon. And while being "humble before the challenges" there isn't much sign that H&M is particularly humble, being keen to trumpet world "firsts" (eg number one buyer of organic cotton etc) at every possible opportunity.

Perhaps H&M is still learning to open up? A year ago I wrote about H&M's 2011 report and Mike Flanagan, CEO of Clothesource, reminded us that H&M has covered a lot of ground relatively quickly when it comes to sustainability reporting.

"From some presposterous moments in the recent past they have moved to being in a small clutch of four or five brands, including Nike and Gap, who believe that they have no alternative but to be as good as possible at sustainability. It's a marked change."

In this report, the most under-reported and significant move has to be H&M's decision to publish a list of the factories that supply 95% of its offering. This is a marked contrast to most of the industry – with the notable exception of Nike, which published its supplier list several years ago – where retailers and brands tend to cite commercial confidentiality as a reason for not sharing this information. Despite Plan A, M&S has not yet published its full supplier list.

And most oversold initiative? I'd give that to H&M's "global system to collect old clothes" – the consumer can drop any old clothes from any brand and gets a £5 voucher (yay! Buy more clothes!) which seems pretty similar to shwopping and many other schemes. When I interviewed Persson a few months back he again stressed the short and the long-term view of the clothes take-back scheme, perhaps as a point of differentiation.

"In the short term we are launching this global initiative that will limit the amount of waste going into landfill. Long term, we will look into a lot of innovation that we hope will lead to enormous benefits to the whole textile industry. I wouldn't even rule out us having our mills," Persson said.

So, a proportion is sold as second-hand clothing – the funds going into a sort of innovation pot, part of the Conscious Fund which will partly fund "textile challenges" – and a proportion recovered and turned into new materials.

Erm, but don't we already have ethically credible and very experienced pioneers who have created a sustainable value chain for old clothes? The charity Traid, an ethical exemplar is clearly unimpressed.

"The clothing bought back to [H&M] stores is then being passed onto a European rag merchant. The clothing would be better placed remaining in the UK and given to UK charities, giving a higher social and environmental impact," said Maria Chenoweth, CEO at Traid.

Another NGO, the Clean Clothing Campaign/Declaration de Berne, isn't impressed either. While the report tells us that Persson "met with the government of Bangladesh in September, when we put forward demands for higher wages and annual wage revisions", the Clean Clothing Campaign has him tagged as a greenwasher (literally, in some imagery). The activists remain clear: only when all retailers move together to raise wages, absorbing an increase of a few cents per item, can a living wage be achieved. Devolving this to host governments is just a pretence.

I mention this dissent not to be unhelpful but as a reminder that fashion brands are peculiarly good at constructing their own reality and narrative. After all, that's why millions of consumers love them with slavish devotion. The 2012 Conscious Action report is good stuff, and at turns very good indeed, but it requires context. Read it, but not in isolation.

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