Corporate Social Responsibility - The CSR Challenges In The Clothing Industry - Case Study On H&M - Case Study Writing Assignment Help

Assignment Task:

H&M was founded in 1947 in Västerås, in Sweden as Hennes, and at the time it was a shop selling women’s clothing. In 1968, the owner bought a hunting and fishing equipment store, Mauritz Widforss, and thus the name changed to Hennes & Mauritz. The acquisition enabled opening sales of men’s and children’s clothing. 6 years later H&M entered the Stockholm Stock Exchange and soon started an expansion outside of Scandinavia (History, H&M). Today the retail-clothing company is truly global, owning six brands and 3600 shops in the whole world. Its shops can be found in most of the big European cities, as well as in Asia, the Americas, Africa and Australia, totalling 57 countries. H&M itself does not own any factories. The team responsible for design resides in Sweden; however, the production is outsourced to about 800 factories in Europe and Asia.  

The company works in the fast-fashion business; therefore, Corporate Social Responsibility plays a major role in its image. Since 2002, it has regularly composed CSR reports, prepared in accordance with the GRI G4 guidelines that are later published on the company’s website.  

Starting in 2009, H&M publishes its social responsibility report by the name of “Conscious Actions Sustainability Report”.  

Around 170 employees are meant to deal with sustainability as their core task. The company’s Sustainability Department devised a CSR policy based on the Seven Commitments: •  

• provide fashion for conscious customers;  ? choose and reward responsible partners;  

• be ethical;  

• be climate-smart;  

• reduce, reuse, recycle;  

• use natural resources responsibly;  

• strengthen communities  

The company takes into consideration stakeholders’ insights, including “customers, colleagues, communities, suppliers and their employees, industry peers, media, NGOs, IGOs, policymakers and investors”(H&M Conscious Actions Sustainability Report 2014, p. 12), while setting up the priorities thanks to continuous communication with them. 

As an apparel corporation, the company is deeply engaged in environmental protection. As Bain (2015) notes, a fast-fashion business model is an obstacle in being sustainable, as it uses resources like water, energy and oil in astounding amounts. Nevertheless, H&M manages to mitigate its environmental impact despite constantly growing and increasing the number of stores. The company measures the climate impact it makes throughout the value chain.   

Over 60% of the environmental impact in the clothing industry is made by fabric production and consumer use. That is why H&M tries to monitor a part of its second-tier suppliers and tries to communicate responsible behaviour to its customers. For example, it introduced an informing label inside the garments about the more responsible use of the product, like washing it in 30oC instead of 60oC.  

The company is directed towards using certified organic cotton, which lessens the climate impact by 46%. Apart from that, H&M uses recycled cotton fabric. Products that are made from those two kinds of cotton in at least 50% are labelled with Conscious hang tag that is easily recognisable by customers. By 2020, the company plans to use only this kind of sustainable cotton. 

H&M is known for its programme of recycling fashion. Almost all of the shops have a collecting point for clothes that are no longer used. The garments can be in any condition and the customer will receive a small reward. Then the old pieces of clothing are reused or recycled. The company claims that none of them goes to waste. So far, the stores collected over 7600 tonnes of used clothes, which is equivalent to around 38 million T-shirts. This idea of circular manufacturing came from the will to close the loop of the product life cycle. The concept assumes that from design, through raw materials, fabric and yarn production, garment production, transport and sales to use, the clothes should not be thrown away, but recycled, going back to the first stage of redesigning and reproducing them as a new garment. The waste created in warehouses is also recycled. Nevertheless, the company encountered a problem with collected clothing – a product can contain a maximum 20% of recycled fabric without lessening the quality and durability. This setback can only be solved with technological innovation that the company is already working on.  

27% of H&M’s electricity comes from renewable resources. Thanks to innovative production processes throughout the supply chain, the company managed to achieve a 55% decrease in the use of energy and a 56% decrease in the use of water. Saving water through modern technology takes an important place in the company’s CSR strategy, both in H&M and its suppliers’ manufacturing facilities, especially in water-scarce areas in China and Bangladesh. 

Another environmentally-friendly innovation currently in motion in H&M is replacing polyutherane, known as vegan leather, with a water-based substitute. The R&D department is testing the durability of the new fabric and coming up with solutions to make it longer lasting. The company is also proud of eliminating all hazardous chemicals in its supply chain. Moreover, it contributes to the promotion of responsible behaviour in the whole industry by co-founding ZDHC (Zero D is the charge of Hazardous Chemicals), that is a group of 18 brands that work actively to protect the environment and eliminate the use of harmful chemicals in the textile and clothing industry by 2020.

Task  

From an ethical corporate social responsibility perspective, attempt the following questions: 

1. Assess the impact of H&M’s CSR policy and evaluate its initiatives to achieve the company’s environmental protection and sustainability goals.                                                             

2. Identify and examine the challenges faced by H&M in meeting its environmental and sustainability ambitions.                                                                               

3. Evaluate H&M’s policy to identify and prevent potential impacts on human rights. Comment on the processes to enable the remediation of any adverse human rights impacts.     

4. Evaluate H&M’s range of Philanthropic activities in contributing to societies and local communities. 

This Case Study Assignment has been solved by our Case Study Experts at My Uni Paper. Our Assignment Writing Experts are efficient to provide a fresh solution to this question. We are serving more than 10000+ Students in Australia, UK & US by helping them to score HD in their academics. Our Experts are well trained to follow all marking rubrics & referencing style.

Be it a used or new solution, the quality of the work submitted by our assignment experts remains unhampered. You may continue to expect the same or even better quality with the used and new assignment solution files respectively. There’s one thing to be noticed that you could choose one between the two and acquire an HD either way. You could choose a new assignment solution file to get yourself an exclusive, plagiarism (with free Turnitin file), expert quality assignment or order an old solution file that was considered worthy of the highest distinction.