Director of Sustainability by Jacqueline Senecal

If I were the director of sustainability at H&M, I would make some serious changes within the company. In recent years, the company has been under a lot of fire for having unsustainable practices that would ruin the environment and their workers standard of living. In terms of the environment, if I were to become the sustainability director there, I would focus on their supply chain from farm to store and focus on reducing the amount of waste at every vantage point because all of this waste is connected and harms every part of the planet. I would first start with sourcing sustainable cotton, with using water saving practices, such as mulching and different types of irrigation, to reduce water consumption at the very beginning. Also, I would take the cotton plant waste and compost them, so they can be re-purposed for soil fertilizer and put back into the field, so there’s essentially no waste to begin with. Secondly, in the process of making the clothing, I would cut down on water consumption and create green factories with solar panels that could cut down on carbon energy, to help de-carbonize the planet. These green factories would have solar panels on top of them, along with ways to collect rainwater, so that it can be used to dye clothing instead of fresh water. For the clothing themselves, I would invest in technology to create fabrics with less chemicals in them, so that they can biodegrade and not have to sit in a landfill if someone chooses to throw out their clothing. This clothing would have no excess packaging and the labels inside would give ways to clean clothes without using excess water, such as freezing, washing small stains, and airing clothes to dry. H&M would promote circular clothing initiatives more than it does already, with making old recycled clothing into new clothes, so that the need for new resources could decrease and we would not be taking more than we give to the environment. Lastly, anything I couldn’t do at H&M to prevent climate change and help the environment, I would offset by investing in renewable technologies with the farmers that produce for H&M, with investments in wind and solar energy. H&M is such a large and profitable company that the budget for this sustainability practice would be reachable. If I were the director of sustainability at H&M, big things would move in the right direction, and hopefully inspire other companies to do the same.