Ah that's a good point.

Though on consideration, I would venture a guess that the purpose of each program might be as different as the governance of each company. Outcomes might be comparable, but I'd bet the arrival path and conversations were very divergent. Judging from this stark choice they've made in this post, the people at Patagonia are clearly thinking VERY differently than most boring and very profitable companies, and I presume that's not skin-deep.

And if so, maybe it's selling one short to glom them together in assessment, based mainly on outcomes instead of routes? I dunno, I could see someone defending either way of looking at it -- focussing on sameness because outcome's are the same, or differentness because paths to decisions differ :)

What matters is what happens to the used clothes. Patagonia resells them to consumers.

So does H&M

> the boxes and sorts the contents into three categories:

> Rewear: Wearable clothes are marketed as secondhand clothing.

> Reuse: If the clothes or textiles are not suitable for rewear, they’re turned into other products, such as remake collections or cleaning cloths.

> Recycle: All other clothes and textiles are shredded into textile fibers and used to make, for example, insulation materials.

The "Rewear" category is reselling the clothing.

They’re being sued for misleading statements about their sustainability: https://www.thefashionlaw.com/hm-is-being-sued-over-misleadi...

Don’t fall for their narrative.

I happen to know someone who works in a H&M store. They throw out any returned items even if they haven't been worn once. It's cheaper than having to put the work into sorting them.

There is often a disconnect between management and lower levels. I suspect the store would probably get in trouble for this behaviour.

Not least because it opens the company up to fines for false advertising (e.g. Australian Competition and Consumer Commission regularly polices companies operating in Australia, which H&M does)

Employees perform the behaviors you incentivize. H&M can have an official policy that disagrees, but if their employees are incentivized not to comply, then they won't, and that's H&M's fault.

See also: Wells Fargo; Amazon

Oh Agreed. A systems problem.

A former company that I worked for wanted their customers (Real Estate Agents) to fill out profiles. They wanted the account managers to encourage this behaviour so they tied the bonus/commission to having it filled out.

Needless to say, the customers had very little interest in filling out the profiles. I found all the account managers sitting around a table at a conference filling them out themselves instead of talking to the customers (as they should have been at the event).

A few even discovered they could fill the fields with '.' characters and game the system (they got caught and fired for crossing the line). The others just wasted valuable time they could have been selling products and got their bonuses.

See Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive

I'm not sure how much of H&M clothes are really collected after use, but at least they have invested in a company that works on recycling fibers from clothes. They own over 10% of it. Probably some of what they collect goes to this Renewcell company for recycling.

https://www.renewcell.com/en/