A revolutionary new sustainable design platform

If the circular economy is to scale beyond a relative handful of companies engaging in a relative handful of initiatives, it’ll need some pretty powerful tools to enable them to assess the impacts of their products across the full value chain: design, materials selection, sourcing, manufacturing, packaging, transportation, merchandising, customer use and beyond.

And to leverage those insights to create the next generation of sustainable, circular, even regenerative products.

Without such a holistic perspective, companies will likely continue to tinker at the margins of circularity: substituting a renewable material here, increasing recyclability there, or maybe creating a program to take back and refurbish or reuse old products.

Tomorrow, at Circularity 21, a new tool will be launched that just might change the game: the Higg Product Module, part of a suite of applications created by the self-described “sustainability insights” startup Higg.

Marketed as “the only software tool on the market that can help companies calculate at scale the environmental footprint of their products beyond carbon emissions,” it stands to raise the bar not just on sustainable and circular materials and products but also the transparency that increasingly is being demanded from a variety of stakeholders.

Last week, I received a Cook’s tour of the platform by its lead developer and spoke with Higg’s CEO to understand how the new tool works and how it could be a game-changer. I came away with a newfound appreciation for the complexity companies face in baking sustainability into their products in a deep and meaningful way.

The Higg Product Module was designed to move beyond a “materials-only” view of product impact, the company said. In addition to the aspects you might expect — environmental assessments of a product’s design, manufacturing, packaging and logistics — it considers the impacts of product durability, customer care of the product, and the waste associated with “excess production.” More than 150 companies already have used the tool to assess over 1,000 products, according to the company. Many of these companies are members of the Sustainable Apparel Coalition (SAC), which developed the tool’s methodology.

The launch of the Product Module represents a long journey for Jason Kibbey, Higg’s CEO, going back to 2010, when SAC was formed by a group of apparel and footwear companies to develop the Higg Index, a suite of tools that measure environmental and social labor impacts across the value chain. (The name “Higg” was inspired by Higgs Boson, the scientific search for a fundamental particle that gives mass to other fundamental particles such as electrons and quarks. The name was also short, easy to pronounce and trademarkable in 120 countries.)

“We wanted to get to the question, what is the footprint of a product across many different impact categories?” Kibbey, who was SAC employee No. 1 before leaving in 2019 to launch Higg, told me. “How do you scale that in a standardized and impactful way quickly so that you can do this for lots and lots of products?”

And, beyond that, how do you share the resulting information with consumers, investors, regulators and other interested parties in a comprehensive and consistent way?

The methodology for the Product Module was developed by the nonprofit SAC but spun off into the for-profit Higg in 2019. “To really make these tools grow and get used, you have to put it on a technology platform or there’s no way to collect the data, there’s no way to share it,” Kibbey explained. “And you can’t really do that well in the context of an industry association.”

The Product Module is the one of several applications that comprise the Higg platform, including those for such tasks as calculating social impacts and retail practices. The newest module is essentially a life-cycle assessment tool that harnesses a methodology that’s been broadly agreed upon by the footwear and apparel industry, enabling comparability across products, brands and borders. It also syncs with existing programs and standards, such as the Product Environmental Footprint, a method for measuring product sustainability being developed by the European Commission in cooperation with companies and sustainability experts.

>>Read on for a deeper dive into the application.

The price isn’t right

The right formula
Increased petrochemical production versus the promise of green chemistry

Material difference
4 things corporations need to know about the Global Plastics Treaty

Changing the menu
The right way to spend patient capital for food reform

Buyer beware
Want data about a product’s sustainability? There’s a browser extension for that

GreenBiz 350 podcast
Episode 272: Fabric recycling, BMW milks dairy-assisted EV charging

·  Forward

Visit Greenbiz

·  Subscribe