H&M drives sustainability efforts
As the natural and organics market continues to dominate the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region, we spoke to Hanna Hallin, Sustainability Manager for H&M Sales Market Greater China about H&M’s recently launched Beauty collection in Singapore and Hong Kong, how it maintains sustainability and its plans for a future sustainable make-up line.
“Sustainability is at the heart of everything we do,” emphasised Hallin. “Naturally when we launched Beauty in Singapore and Hong Kong this autumn, we carried the full range, including our Conscious Beauty collection.”
High on H&M’s agenda are eco-friendly and recyclable products and packaging: “All packaging has been designed using recycled and FSC certified materials,” Hallin went on to say.
“All products in the H&M conscious beauty collection are organic and certified by the third party certification scheme, Ecocert. That states that at least 95% of the ingredients of the finished product must be of natural origin. A minimum of 10% of all ingredients by weight must come from organic farming, excluding water, while the remaining 5% must come from a very restricted list,” said Hallin.
Evolving Product Lines
“We are constantly trying to evolve our assortment and products to be more sustainable, both when it comes to packaging and the content of our Beauty products. We are also constantly working with increasing the quality which also makes our products long lasting, another important sustainability aspect,” added Hallin.
“In the future, we aspire to launch a sustainable make-up line, so we are closely following developments and innovation in this field.”
Hallin emphasised the difference in sustainability priorities between consumers in China and Europe: “In China, our customers have high expectations on product safety while our European customers emphasise more on the decent working conditions in the supply chain”.
Ensuring sustainability maintains at the heart of everything they do, it remains a key factor in R&D and product innovations.
“We strongly believe that sustainability will continue to be important in everything we do. We only have one planet and we need to take better care of our resources. We see that in most new science and development projects, sustainability is taken into consideration and we expect new innovations which will make it easier for us to work in more sustainable ways.”
Hanna Hallin, the Sustainability Manager for H&M Sales Market Greater China, will be speaking on sustainability in retailing at the Sustainable Cosmetics Summit in Hong Kong between 14th-15th November 2016. For more information, visit www.sustainablecosmeticssummit.com
