Fast fashion giants like H&M, Zara, and Shein are under increasing scrutiny for their environmental impact. Here’s how they actually stack up, and why even the best performers still fall short.
The race to clean up fast fashion is less a sprint and more a series of sluggish, uneven strides. Among the crowd, H&M has managed to emerge as the improbable frontrunner — not because it’s sustainable, but because its competitors, particularly Zara and Shein, make it look almost virtuous by comparison.
In the most recent Fossil-Free Fashion Scorecard, H&M landed a B+, a rare bright spot in a field of otherwise dismal grades. It was the only fast fashion company deemed to have a “high integrity” emissions plan, accounting for carbon output not just in its own operations but throughout its vast, global supply chain. That matters. Most brands love to talk about solar panels on office buildings while ignoring the coal-fired factories making their clothes.
We are proud that Stand.earth has rated us the highest — out of 42 global fashion companies — in their Fossil-Free Fashion Scorecard for the second year in a row,” Henrik Sundberg, Climate Impact Lead, H&M Group, said in a statement. “We are pleased to see that our efforts to meet our ambitious climate targets — through clear roadmaps, investments in renewable energy and supplier financing to speed up decarbonisation, together with our advocacy work — are being recognised by Stand.earth.”
Sundberg says though there is still more to do, this recognition reinforces the label’s “direction and determination” to drive meaningful change, and, he says, “we remain committed to delivering on our ambitious climate agenda to reduce our absolute greenhouse gas emissions.”
The grades were stark by comparison. Zara, owned by Inditex, earned a C+. Shein? Not even close. Its emissions from shipping alone are staggering — up nearly 14 percent in a single year — and it’s facing legal scrutiny in Europe for misleading claims about sustainability. No one in this trio is saving the planet, but only one has even begun to sketch out a roadmap.
And still, H&M’s supposed leadership position says more about the state of the industry than about its own accomplishments.
The illusion of progress
H&M has leaned hard into transparency. For nearly a decade, it has published a list of its suppliers and factories. It has funded circularity projects and climate initiatives and claimed industry-first milestones in recycled materials. Its website reads like a checklist of climate buzzwords: Scope 3 emissions, take-back programs, certified fibers.
But the brand still makes billions of garments a year. Overproduction remains the problem it won’t touch. Even with all its recycling and resale partnerships, most clothes aren’t being recirculated — they’re being incinerated or dumped. The emissions plans may be polished, but the business model remains the same: fast, cheap, and disposable.
Zara has a similar story, albeit with a bit less PR shine. Its parent company Inditex has pledged to run all of its operations on renewable electricity by 2025 and uses growing amounts of certified cotton and recycled fabrics. Its proximity-based production model, which often favors European factories, helps reduce some shipping emissions. But transparency is patchy, and there’s little evidence that its resale and repair efforts are anything more than window dressing.
Then there’s Shein. The brand’s meteoric rise — and the speed with which it pumps out thousands of new styles every day — has made it the poster child for ultra-fast fashion. Its emissions outstrip those of many legacy fashion houses combined, yet its sustainability reports remain vague and largely unverified. Even when it makes pledges, the numbers don’t align. A recent climate target to reduce emissions by 25 percent sounds ambitious until you realize it’s benchmarked against adjusted, previously underreported figures. Meanwhile, lawsuits and fines in Europe accuse the company of misleading consumers with greenwashed language.
Transparency as currency
If emissions targets and recycled textiles are the gold standard of sustainability plans, transparency is the currency that buys trust. And right now, few fast fashion brands are spending it.
In the most recent Fashion Transparency Index, only two brands — OVS and Gucci — scored above 80 percent. (Gucci is now facing labor issues that could cancel out its sustainability efforts.) H&M trailed slightly behind but still earned a respectable 71 percent, a notable lead over Inditex’s 53. Shein’s score hovered somewhere south of seven percent, depending on the estimate.
Transparency doesn’t guarantee progress, but without it, progress is impossible to measure. Brands like H&M, for all their faults, allow researchers, journalists, and watchdogs to follow the supply chain from raw material to finished product. That visibility enables third-party audits, NGO pressure, and the possibility — however slim — of systemic change.
By contrast, brands that shroud their production in secrecy can operate with impunity. It’s no coincidence that Shein’s factory conditions have repeatedly come under fire, with undercover investigations revealing illegal labor practices and workers clocking shifts well beyond legal limits.
This is, of course, not even close to fast fashion’s full picture. Stroll through any Westfield establishment and it is the norm: Hollister, Victoria’s Secret, Old Navy, Edicted, and on offer seemingly different flavors of the same mass factory-produced fast garments.
Circularity’s new gloss
Retailers are rushing to slap the word “circular” on every possible initiative — recycling bins in stores, resale platforms, capsule collections made from scraps. But in fast fashion, circularity often becomes a marketing term rather than a material commitment.
The truth is, textile recycling remains a logistical nightmare. Most clothes are blended fabrics, difficult to separate and nearly impossible to break down at scale. Even the most advanced chemical recycling methods still rely on fossil fuels for processing, and very little of the output makes it back into garments.
H&M may have invested in fiber-to-fiber recycling technology and launched take-back schemes, but only a small fraction of what is collected ends up truly reused. Zara is exploring similar ideas, albeit on a smaller scale. Shein’s “EvoluSHEIN” collection, which claims to use recycled polyester, has been called out for misleading messaging by regulators in Europe. A collection can be recyclable without ever being recycled, and that’s the line most fast fashion brands walk.
All of this exists within a much larger problem: the speed and scale of production. Fast fashion’s very existence hinges on churning out more clothes than anyone could ever need. And Shein has taken that logic to its natural endpoint.
While Zara and H&M still follow seasonal drops and campaign-style releases, Shein has obliterated the calendar. Thousands of new items are uploaded to its site daily, many based on real-time search trends or scraped designs. It’s a model built for algorithmic consumption, not longevity.
Even if Shein were to replace every garment with a carbon-neutral, vegan, 100 percent recycled version tomorrow, it wouldn’t solve the problem. Because a billion “sustainable” items are still a billion too many.
Who ranks, and why it matters
If you strip away the brand messaging and look solely at emissions data, supplier disclosures, and volume metrics, the ranking becomes clear.
H&M sits at the top — not because it’s doing everything right, but because it’s doing more than most. Inditex follows, buoyed by logistics efficiency and investment in renewable energy. Shein, despite its money and market share, remains fundamentally incompatible with sustainability.
Other fast fashion players like Primark, Forever 21, Topshop, and American Eagle rank even lower, scoring near the bottom of the industry’s sustainability assessments. Resale is minimal. Labor disclosures are often nonexistent. Emissions data, if published at all, is vague and unverified.
In this landscape, sustainability isn’t just about who makes better promises. It’s about who backs those promises with measurable action. And for now, H&M is the only fast fashion brand with a clear line of sight on decarbonization, however narrow that path may be.
A warning, not a win
“We have known about the climate crisis and its potential impacts for decades,” Fashion Revolution’s Liv Simpliciano told Vogue Business last year. “This is the defining crisis of our time and it has been a preventable disaster.”
For all its scoring systems and sustainability reports, the fashion industry still emits more than most countries and dumps billions of garments annually. So perhaps the question isn’t whether one fast fashion brand is better than another, but whether or not the model itself can ever be reconciled with a livable planet.
Right now, the most sustainable fast fashion brand is still one you don’t buy.
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