Higg School

What’s the true cost of the gear we buy? Meet the outdoor industry’s leading toolbox for measuring social and environmental impacts.

BY JONATHAN EIDSE ILLUSTRATION NADIA NÖRBOM

What is Higg, and why is it needed?

What are the carbon, water, energy, social and labor impacts of a product or process? And what would be the tradeoffs and benefits of exchanging one material for another? Answering such questions is critical to creating a lower-impact product – but doing so is anything but straightforward. This first requires some form of common language and measurement from which to compare two or more different things. It requires standardization.

Launched in 2019 by the Sustainable Apparel Coalition (though now an independent entity), Higg is the most prominent platform, providing standardized scores for fiber types, treatments and production methods based on their impacts.

What kind of capabilities does Higg offer?

To meet the demand of brands, retailers, suppliers, and consumers for more sustainable products, Higg offers an array of tools. Perhaps the most well-known are the Higg Product Tools. The Higg Materials Sustainability Index (Higg MSI), for example, uses the industry’s most comprehensive life cycle assessment databases to calculate environmental impacts and translate them into comparable scores. By exchanging variables, product designers can easily see the relative environmental costs, benefits and trade-offs of different materials and make more informed choices.

Going beyond the material level, the Higg Product Module (Higg PM) then assesses the cradle-tograve environmental impacts of a product based on five categories: Global Warming Potential, Nutrient Pollution in Water, Water Scarcity, Fossil Fuel Depletion, and Chemistry.

Further behind the scenes of a product lies a vast network of facilities producing the various components used to make it. Here, a range of Higg Facility Tools provides standardized social and environmental assessments that are designed to improve production safety and sustainability along the entire supply chain.

Products and materials aside, business operations themselves also have impacts. This is where the Higg Brand & Retail Module (Higg BRM) comes in, which offers a standardized way of measuring an organization’s sustainability performance. This then enables brands and retailers to benchmark their performance against similar companies and, more importantly, helps them identify where the greatest room for improvement lies.

What are Higg’s benefits and limitations?

It is very costly for most brands to determine the impacts of their products all the way down the value chain. But what if many companies were to join together in this effort and share their data? Thanks to having the greatest degree of buy-in from the industry, Higg now sits on a massive database. With this aggregate data, fairly accurate assumptions can be made on material, product, and organizational impacts.

But aggregate data can also miss very important details, such as producers that perform far better or worse than the industry average. Furthermore, much data is supplied via self-assessments. This means that data may overrepresent those willing to share their data. In other words, the data from poor performers may not be included, even if they may be major producers in their particular market.

Is there a consumer version of Higg?

In 2022 Higg rolled out a public-facing version of Higg MSI that provided a visual scorecard of a product’s impacts to help consumers quickly identify the more sustainable products. The initiative quickly ran into legal issues, however, which stemmed in part from the above-mentioned limitations of aggregate data. While industry can freely use such data for their own internal purposes, consumer protection laws require a far greater degree of specificity and accuracy to any product claims. As such, the roll-out of the public-facing Higg MSI has been set on hold pending an internal review.

Higg is a suite of tools for measuring the sustainability performance of apparel and footwear products, facilities, and companies. It assesses environmental and social impacts throughout the supply chain and enables companies to make informed decisions to improve their sustainability practices.