The programme provides a consistent way for brands, retailers and manufacturers to share sustainability information on apparel and footwear products, across impact categories such as water use, greenhouse gas emissions, and use of fossil fuels.
SAC members Amazon, Boozt, C&A, Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger (owned by PVH Corp), Columbia Sportswear, H&M, Helly Hansen, JustWears, Lenzing AG, Norrona, Puma, Salomon, and Zalando announced their commitment to implement the first phase of the programme on a wide selection of products available in the US and Europe, ranging from tops and skirts, to backpacks and purses, the companies said in a joint press release.
At launch, the programme will focus on the environmental impact of a product’s materials, and will expand over the next two years to incorporate additional data including manufacturing and corporate responsibility.
Built on a decade’s worth of tool development, consumer testing, and contributed environmental impact data, this first phase of the Higg Index transparency programme is an important step towards a unified approach for industry-wide transparency – in order to provide shoppers with unprecedented visibility into a product’s real impact.
The main components of the programme are the Higg Index Sustainability Profile and the Higg Index Materials seal, both of which are based on independent and externally reviewed environmental impact data from the Higg Materials Sustainability Index (MSI).
The Higg Index Sustainability Profile is a new scorecard for sharing data on a product’s environmental impact. H&M and Norrona have embedded Higg Index Sustainability Profiles on their e-commerce platforms in the US and Europe, with plans to scale up to additional products throughout the year.
C&A, Salomon, Tommy Hilfiger, and Zalando plan to implement Sustainability Profiles on their platforms in the coming months. Simultaneously, Amazon announced the addition of the Higg Index Materials seal to its list of trusted certifications for its Climate Pledge Friendly programme, which helps make it easy for customers across the US and Europe to discover and shop for more sustainable products, the release said.
“Transparency itself is not the end game, but it’s a critical step for transforming the industry and establishing a new era of accountability. By leveraging the Higg Index — starting first with environmental data and then expanding to include social impacts — we can help both businesses and consumers make better decisions, and drive collective action at scale,” said Amina Razvi, executive director of the SAC.
This first phase will focus on evaluating material environmental impacts, leveraging data from the Higg Materials Sustainability Index (MSI), part of the Higg Index suite of sustainability measurement tools developed by the SAC. The Higg MSI is a tool used by designers, product developers, and analysts to understand the costs, benefits, and trade-offs of different materials that serve the same functional purpose for a product.
Over the next 18 months, the transparency programme will expand to incorporate environmental facility data through the Higg Facility Environmental Module (FEM) as well as brand and retail operations data through the Higg Brand & Retail Module (BRM). By early 2023, the programme will have expanded to incorporate social data from facilities, becoming the first holistic system for communicating sustainability performance across a product’s lifecycle.
Fibre2Fashion News Desk (KD)