New Synergies Form With Higg Amid Greenwash Claims
Those following the leading sustainability tools closely will be interested to know that Bluesign and Zero Discharge Hazardous Chemicals announced new partnerships with Higg on Wednesday.
The sustainability insights and measurement platforms hope to eliminate redundancies and allow for better data integration to provide industry clients with improved environmental performance in their supply chains.
More from WWD
“Reliable and universally consumable data is the best weapon we have for advancing sustainability performance as an industry,” said James Schaffer, chief strategy officer of Higg. “Soon, customers will be able to take advantage of tighter integration between Bluesign and Higg assessments. At the same time, through our developing partnership with ZDHC we’ll be able to explore more powerful, scalable solutions for joint customers that need to improve chemical usage and wastewater treatment across their entire supply chain.”
Synergies already exist between the partners. More than 19,000 Bluesign-approved chemicals have achieved ZDHC’s highest conformance standard, being added to ZDHC’s gateway. Higg will work with ZDHC to bring ZDHC’s facility improvement resources to Higg customers, including the Resource Efficiency Module, which is focused on greenhouse gas emissions, water and pollution.
“Focusing on chemical management is essential to creating a cleaner supply chain and tackling climate change” said Daniel Rufenacht, Bluesign’s chief executive officer. “It is important to partner with all stakeholders to drive change and mitigate the effects of harmful chemicals across the product life cycle. Our partnership with Higg is a further step toward that.”
The news comes at a time when sustainability tools are seeing mounting skepticism. (Though Higg is the technology partner, the Sustainable Apparel Coalition manages the methodology behind the Higg Index tools.) Last week, the SAC issued a statement in response to the Norwegian and Dutch consumer authorities’ cautionary guidance on marketing Higg MSI (materials sustainability index) data to consumers. While the SAC respected the non-legal guidance, it reaffirmed that such discretion doesn’t apply to how the industry uses the rest of its tools internally.
“The important task now is for us to work through this guidance with legal and topic experts to explore the feasibility of application while ensuring any resulting methodology and communications are in line with the wider European framework,” the SAC said in a press statement.
As previously announced, the SAC has begun a third-party expert review of the Higg MSI to further evaluate and develop the tool, but there are no updates at this time.
