Upfront with Anna Gedda, head of sustainability at H&M

What makes H&M’s Conscious Exclusive collection ‘conscious’?

The collections are made from sustainable materials and offer our design team an opportunity to experiment with new, interesting, sustainable materials that we might then scale up and use in our regular collections. One such material is recycled polyester that we tried out a number of years ago... we are now one of the world’s biggest buyers.

A new material that we have been working with is Bionic, made from recovered plastic from shorelines, waterways and coastal communities. This is the first time it has been used to make delicate evening wear. Why can’t all H&M’s clothes be made like this?

This collection is not the only conscious collection at H&M; we also offer a continuous range of sustainable materials that can be found in our stores all year round. Today 26 per cent of the materials we use to make our clothes are either organic, recycled or in other sustainable fabrics. Thirty-one per cent of all our cotton – which is the material we use most – is sustainably sourced. Our goal is for all our cotton to come from sustainable sources by 2020. What steps is H&M making as a business towards a more sustainable future? The H&M group has been committed to sustainability for a long time, and we are proud of what we have achieved so far. But the fashion industry is still facing big challenges and we need to rethink how fashion is made and used. Therefore we want to use our size and scale to lead the change from a linear fashion model towards a circular one. The ambition is to create fashion where nothing is wasted; where garments are collected and recycled into new collections so that we use what’s already in the system instead of using new raw material. There are still technical challenges to overcome before we are there, but we focus a lot of our work and resources on finding innovations that work on a larger scale so that we can eventually make a fully circular process possible.