Fashionable Greenwashing?

Earlier this year, the Swedish clothing chain H&M ran into some trouble over its practice of slash-and-dump. When clothes didn't sell, store employees destroyed them, ripping the fabric to dissuade any fashion-forward freegans from scoring free graphic Ts or sweater dresses at the store's Dumpster. Borders faced a similar scandal when it turned out the company had advised the employees of its closing subsidiary, Waldenbooks, to purposefully destroy remaining merchandise.

Such conspicuous waste attracts consumer attention, but so does conspicuous mislabeling, as H&M learned in its second difficult lesson of the New Year. Initially, the story seemed fairly simple: The German edition of The Financial Times reported that the certified-organic cotton clothing sold by stores like H&M, C&A and Tchibo was contaminated with genetically modified cotton seed from India.

But the plot thickened as H&M and some third-party certification groups mentioned in the report questioned its validity, according to Ecouterre.  The Control Union, one of the third-party certifiers that work with H&M, said the data was off.  The group issued a statement reported by Green Inc.: "It was mentioned that 30 percent of the organic cotton sold in Germany contains BT-seed cotton. For us it is unclear which data was used to come to this conclusion, and how the link with India was made."

H&M, which is a member of Organic Exchange, a group that promotes the use of organic cotton, released statements of its own. The chain said that it believed Control Union had tightened its certification process -- and done pop inspections of all its Indian organic cotton farms -- over the past year, after criticism from the cotton-regulating authority of India.

But GMOs are, as I've written before, sometimes hard to contain. In Green Inc., Organic Exchange's director LaRhea Pepper notes that GM-free cotton from the field can pick up traces at gins or "delinting companies." Ultimately, though, it's the retailer that must be able to certify its own end-product, if it's to avoid charges of greenwashing. That's because buying clothing made from organic cotton is a mostly conscience-driven purchase (more akin to buying Fair Trade coffee than an organically grown peach). If consumers lose confidence in the product's certification standards (even if the GM cotton seeds have no affect on the fabric's softness or the pesticide-free environment in which it was grown), they'll feel they've been hoodwinked by their own hoodies.

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Image credit: Cotton bales (Don Klumpp/Iconica/Getty Images)