Numlock Sunday: Amanda Shendruk on how fast fashion misleads on sustainability
By Walt Hickey
Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.
This week I spoke to Amanda Shendruk, who wrote Quartz investigation: H&M showed bogus environmental scores for its clothing for Quartz. Here's what I wrote about it:
H&M, the fast fashion retailer that produces 3 billion garments a year, regularly touts to environmental and sustainability bona fides of its products on its website using an industry-derived metric called the Higg Index, which scores the impact of making an article of clothing. However, a new analysis found that it appears H&M's website is at times overstating the actual sustainability of its clothing: Of 630 garments with a Higg Index that Quartz analyzed on their site, 326 of them didn't actually have an improved impact on the environment, 136 items were displayed as being better for the environment than they in fact were, and just 168 were correct in their assertion that they had an improved impact on the environment.
I’m a big fan of Amanda’s journalism — longtime p…