Sustainable Apparel Coalition launches Higg-Index

There are exciting news from the Sustainable Apparel Coalition today!

The Coalition, which represents one third of the global apparel and footwear industry, today announced the launch of the so called Higg-Index. This new index forms a groundbreaking common approach to measuring and evaluating sustainability performance on product level across the apparel and footwear industry.

By using the Higg-Index, companies can analyze and quantify the sustainability impacts of their products from the raw material until it reaches the stores. That makes it a great tool to identify priorities for actions and opportunities for innovation.

But much more than that, I am confident that by driving measurable performance improvement, this index will further drive behavior change in our industry and our supply chains in order to reduce environmental and social impact and create better products.

At H&M, we have successfully tested the use of the index over the last months together with two supplier factories. We are now looking forward to score and benchmark more and more of our products, helping us to further improve them. Ultimately, we aim to go public with such product scores in the future.

I would like to take this opportunity to say `thank you` to the several people in my team and from all our partners in the Coalition for all the passionate work they have invested into developing the index during the last two years. I am once again thrilled to see what we can achieve if we all work together and I strongly believe that this is the best way forward in our continued work to tackle also the complex challenges ahead of our entire industry.

The Sustainable Apparel Coalition was founded by global sustainability leaders in the apparel and footwear industry, including H&M, together with leading environmental and social organizations.

Read more about the Sustainable Apparel Coalition at apparelcoalition.org and in Wall Street Journal.

Helena Helmersson is our Head of Sustainability. Opinions expressed are her personal views and do not necessarily represent the official views of H&M. Do you have questions or feedback? Please click here.