Measurement without Clear Incentives to Improve: The Impacts of the Higg Facility Environmental Module (FEM) on Apparel Factory Practices and Performance

Poor environmental and social practices are common across the apparel industry. Over the past 30 years, Non-governmental Organizations (NGOs) have steadily pressured buyers to make sustainability improvements in their supply chains. Yet, literally billions of dollars, and many attempts at new environmental standards, codes, monitoring, and capacity building programs have failed to drive significant progress in environmental performance. Against this pessimistic backdrop, an 11-year old initiative—the Sustainable Apparel Coalition (SAC)—has developed the leading strategy to drive sustainability within the global apparel industry. Its major initiative has been the Higg Index: a suite of six data tools. The Facility Environment Module (FEM), now in version 3.0, is the annual assessment of an apparel facility’s environmental management capabilities, procedures, and plans. This report is the output of a four-year analysis of the implementation and effectiveness of the FEM v2.0. This report analyzes whether the standards, measurement, verification, and learning processes advanced through the FEM improve the environmental performance of the apparel industry. The study covers quantitative data analysis of all FEM v2.0 data, a survey of a select sample of facilities, and case studies of eight facilities in Bangladesh and China. Our overall conclusion is that the FEM is having foundational, but not transformative impacts as it still lacks critical incentives to change factory practices. If factories were to receive more or fewer orders based on their FEM score, there might be sufficient internal incentives for improvement. Yet this internal mechanism is only likely to be successful if there is external transparency and accountability.

Environmental Sustainability Evaluation of Apparel Product: A Case Study on Knitted T-Shirt

The work reported in this paper presents the assessment of environmental performances of selected branded apparel T-Shirt products made by Bangladesh. The study is based on a standard evaluation tool named Higg Index which is basically used widely to measure the environmental sustainability of various apparel products. Higg Index is an internal self-assessment tool created by the outdoor apparel industry and Nike’s apparel environmental design tool which aims to aggregate information on the environmental performance of products. The Index considers performance across the full life-cycle of a product, including impacts from “input materials, manufacturing, packaging, transportation, use, and end-of-life.” Selected apparel branded T-Shirt products from S. Oliver, BUTex-Innovation, PUMA, Esprit, Aarong, and Yellow were taken into consideration. The results indicate that newly developed ecofriendly T-shirt and foreign branded products named S. Oliver, PUMA, and Esprit gained higher score but local branded product like Aarong and Yellow gained lower score in terms of environmental sustainability based on Higg Index assessment tool. Moreover, many weaknesses and opportunities for improvement of both local and foreign branded T-Shirt products have been identified and suggested which would eventually lead the fashion designer, apparel manufacturer, stakeholder, and consumer towards greener apparel products.