Chances are there are H&M items in your wardrobe. You may even be wearing something from the Swedish high street giant as you read this. A light T-shirt, perhaps, or a practical pair of jogging bottoms? A chic sweater maybe or a positively fashion-forward full midi skirt? Or how about a piece from one of their phenomenally popular designer collaborations: an Isabel Marant for H&M pair of tasselled boots? Or a Stella McCartney for H&M blazer? 

Chances are you also make noises about being concerned about climate change. You separate your rubbish and you worry about your carbon emissions. 

And of course you care about the tragedy that occurred at the Rana Plaza factory in Bangladesh in April 2013, the factory collapse that killed 1,133 people (leaving 800 children orphaned) and alerted those of us that had been wilfully, busily looking the other way to the working conditions of the men and women who make the clothes we wear.

"H&M is keen to point out too that we, the customers, can play a key role in helping to make fashion sustainable."

H&M knows we feel this way, they’ve done the research, they’ve identified the fact that consumers of so-called ‘fast fashion’ consider the environment and garment-makers’ working conditions as well as thinking about the price and design when they go shopping. They know we care and they care too. 

Anna Gedda, H&M’s social sustainability manager, says: ‘We do a survey every six months where we ask people how they feel about sustainability and one question is ‘How often do you actually look for sustainable fashion?’ and in the last survey this figure was 45 per cent, which is a pretty high percentage. And what’s really interesting is that a year previously that figure was 27 per cent, so we can really see a rapid increase.’

Always ones to spearhead a retail trend, H&M have sensed that altruistic shift coming, they’ve anticipated that we would feel that way and they’ve put a thorough and transparent sustainability policy in place.

The H&M definition of sustainability is ‘clothing made in an environmentally and socially responsible way’, Gedda, a sweet-natured Swede, explains when we sit down to talk sustainability over a subsidised smoothie in H&M’s bright and airy head office canteen.  

‘When we started working with sustainability in the 1990s, it was very much issue-based,’ she says, ‘child labour was a big thing, but over the years this has expanded and sustainability today includes so many different aspects.’

‘We have had to learn how to prioritise and focus. It’s about identifying the biggest issues and seeing where we have the best possibility of influencing those issues. Some clever person said “You can do anything but you can’t do everything.”’

"H&M’s Conscious Exclusive collection is making sustainability sexy, creating clothes that are genuinely beautiful and, crucially in 2014, endorsed by celebrities."

This doesn’t mean that H&M is unambitious, however; far from it, as Gedda says it is their aim to be at the ‘forefront’ of sustainability, not just compared to their high street fashion competitors but with their sustainability peers, massive global brands like Unilever and IKEA, and they collaborate with international organisations and NGOs on impressive and daunting projects. For example, by 2020 H&M says that all the cotton it uses will come from sustainable sources. To help make this goal a reality, H&M has joined forces with the Better Cotton Initiative, an organisation that aims ‘to make global cotton production better for the people who produce it, better for the environment it grows in and better for the sector’s future’.

‘Cotton is so important as it’s one of the most common materials that we use. At the same time we know that it’s associated with a lot of social and environmental issues,’ Gedda admits. ‘Cotton is very water-intensive and cotton grows in very dry areas [mainly in India and China], where water is scarce and also cotton is affected by insects so it uses a lot of pesticides. So the Better Cotton programme educates the farmers about when to use water so they use less water, and which insects are good and which insects are bad and when they need to use pesticides and when one insect will eat another…We gain cotton that is more environmentally friendly and the farmers don’t have to spend as much on water and pesticide.' 

Gedda and H&M are keen to point out too that we, the customers, can play a key role in helping to make fashion sustainable. This is the kind of chat I am inclined to lazily scoff at but she presents some pretty convincing figures to back up the point. For example, the greatest percentage of greenhouse gas emissions occur after the garment has been bought, with washing, tumble-drying and ironing contributing more than fibre production or transport or packaging.

H&M points this out not to shirk its responsibility or somehow pass the blame on, but rather to remind us that we can all take steps to counteract the negative aspects of our love of the high street. And they’re making it easier than ever for us to take those steps. They’re developing a ‘Clever Care’ label – encouraging us to wash at lower temperatures and line-dry our clothes –which will be in all H&M garments by the end of the year and, even more impressively, they have found a way of dealing with one of the biggest by-products of fast fashion: clothes that we don’t want anymore. 

"Workers were not aware of their rights, they didn’t know that if they were pregnant they were allowed to take paid time off or if they were sexually harassed at work, they were able to tell someone about it."

Last year, they became the first company to launch a global clothes-collecting initiative, installing recycling bins in stores in every market (53 and counting) and offering H&M vouchers in exchange for old clothes, which don’t have to be H&M and can be any stage of ‘used’, from barely worn to completely disintegrating. ‘Some of the clothes can be resold and resused and that’s really the best outcome, to prolong the life of the garment as much as possible,' explains Gedda, ‘some of it is recycled, made into filling in sofa, woven into carpets, and then a small proportion is incinerated for energy. But nothing ends in landfill.’ And some of the clothes end up hanging on H&M rails as part of the Close the Loop collection, which comprises pieces made with denim developed using the recycled materials collected in stores, a paradigm of high street sustainability.

Meanwhile H&M’s (slightly more expensive) Conscious Exclusive collection is making sustainability sexy: this year the brand’s head of fashion and sustainability, Catarina Midby, teamed up with the fashion industry’s most fashion-y eco-conscious think tank Ever Manifesto (headed up by the ultra-glamorous Alexia Niedzielski, Charlotte Casiraghi and Elizabeth von Guttman) to create clothes that are genuinely beautiful (and, crucially in 2014, endorsed by celebrities, who wear them on the red carpet) as well being made using sustainable materials (organic Swedish leather) and practices (hand-sewing for a fair price by women in Indian communities). 

"Most of us in the Western World shop on the high street, it is the reality we have created, and H&M is making an attempt to make high street fashion more sustainable."

But environmental issues are just one aspect of sustainability, and the human and social costs of affordable fashion are also a concern for all of us who buy T-shirts that cost less than our lunch. Gedda is frank and forthright on the topic. ‘I am always talking about garment production because that is something we get a lot of questions about, especially on the social side,’ she says. Even though H&M didn't produce clothing in the Bangladeshi factory that collapsed – there was initially some confusion as H&M, like most retailers, doesn’t own the factories in which its clothes are produced, and news outlets were struggling to discover what was made out of where – it became the first European retailer to sign an accord guaranteeing fire and safety conditions in factories in Bangladesh. Inditex, which owns Zara, quickly followed. 

‘We are a big brand, we can gather a lot of other brands and those coalitions are so much stronger than brands working in isolation,’ Gedda says. ‘That’s really the point of our policy: using our size as leverage to create coalitions.’         

Outlining the ways in which H&M are working on improving life for the men and women working in the factories they use, Gedda says: ‘We do a lot of audits to make sure that the factories are compliant with our code: in 2012, we did more than 2,600 audits. And then we work with capacity-building as well: how can we train the suppliers, how can we train the workers. One thing that we noticed was really bad in Bangladesh was that workers were not aware of their rights, they didn’t know that if they were pregnant they were allowed to take paid time off or if they were sexually harassed at work, they were able to tell someone about it.’ 

H&M have since set about educating employees, who are terrified of unemployment, on their rights, recruiting Bangladeshi movie stars to star in soap opera-themed training videos, as well as collaborating with their suppliers and the Bangladeshi government on their fair living wage strategy, which aims to ensure that all textile workers producing garments for H&M are paid a fair living wage by 2018.

The fact that this fair living wage is not a present reality underlines the message that there is a lot to be done in the field of fashion retail ethics: brands are working within, and profiting within, the existing structure, but most of us in the Western World shop on the high street, it is the reality we have created, and H&M is making an attempt – a public, easily accessible and even pioneering attempt – to make high street fashion more sustainable, both environmentally and socially. And that can only be a good thing.

The Conscious and Conscious Exclusive collections are in stores and online from today, April 10; The Closing the Loop collection is in H&M stores now. 

To learn more about H&M's sustainability work – including their strategy for better wages and working conditions for factory employees, their policy on using eco-conscious materials and organic cotton, their strategy on water conservation and animal welfare, and their garment collecting scheme – visit the H&M Conscious website.