Amongst many instrumental tools of sustainability, Sustainable Apparel Coalition (SAC), US, is quite well-appreciated and a truly growing one. SAC is a global alliance of all stakeholders with an aim to create an apparel, footwear and home textiles industry that produces no unnecessary environmental harm and has a positive impact on people and communities associated with its activities. Globally connected with 70 brands/retailers, 66 manufacturers and in total over 195 members, there are four Indian giants (Pratibha Syntex, Arvind Ltd., KG Denim and Aditya Birla) closely working with it. Apparel Online discussed the manifold perspectives of SAC with its CEO Jason Kibbey who was recently in India.
Till date, Higg Index has completed over 15,000 assessments by 6,977 companies. Out of these, 497 companies are located in India.
Higg Index, the core driver of SAC, is a self-assessment standard for assessing environmental and social sustainability throughout the supply chain. The result of unparalleled collaboration, enabling transparency for the entire industry, it has so far completed over 15,000 assessments. SAC brought forth a uniform environmental sustainability approach to the sector for both the brands and the factories. Now it is almost close to creating a standardized social and labour assessment with many other partners. “Many brands have adopted Higg and we certainly have many more who we would like to see adopting to Higg usage,” says Jason who describes that after self-assessment, the results are to be verified through different means which will create the ultimate impact. “Verification is currently underway, though we expect to see a significant spread of verification with the launch of our Higg 3.0 assessment (expected to come till October 2017),” he shared. The more an apparel factory scores in Higg Index, higher are its chances of being the priority of buyers, as buyers compare this score of various factories. Besides, various factories and retailers can analyse their current standing with this Index to see where they are lacking compared to their fellow players and how best they can improve themselves.
Transparency is one of SAC’s core values. Anybody can access Higg Index 2.0 content from its website and check where his/her factory stands.
As far as apparel manufacturers for Indian domestic markets are concerned, their buyers may not push them for sustainability. Nobody will come and tell them about it. They have to see for themselves how their fellow exporters, top domestic brands or other manufacturers focusing on sustainability are getting benefited, be it in the form of more efficient and productive workers or something else.
After this assessment, the biggest challenge that comes up for apparel manufacturers is to find out ways to improve their score and for this, SAC endeavours to offer training. It works with other providers to conduct training on Higg and has great partnerships with the Clothing Industry Training Authority in Hong Kong, Reset Carbon in Bangkok, Li and Fung and others. Jason further informs that currently his team is working to develop several programmes for inducing such training sessions, and has also published a ‘How to Higg’ manual that guides the manufacturers about the procedure to use Higg Index in their facility.
Referring to its Indian members, Jason proudly says that the Indian companies are all great leaders in sustainability and there is a lot to learn from them. In his words, “Typically, manufacturers that have staff and capacity in sustainability join SAC. While this is the case for all of the companies mentioned, there are many Indian manufacturers just getting started in sustainability that do not have staff solely dedicated for the purpose.” Focusing more on India, SAC will have a meeting in Bangalore on May 22-23, 2017, co-hosting the event of Planet Textiles and Manufacturers Forum with ZDHC (Zero Discharge of Hazardous Chemicals) on the 25th of May.
Ownership at the implementation level is emerging as a trend and I must appreciate that it is growing in most of the places.
Apparel manufacturers, who are not members of SAC, are also getting benefited from SAC or Higg Index as they can also use this assessment to help them improve their sustainability performance. High-performing companies ideally will lower their costs through greater efficiency as well as gain recognition from their customers. Finally, non-member companies that use the Higg Index will receive access to basic benchmarking to understand how they measure against their peers. “Companies, that are members, benefit from being able to create future versions of the Higg Index, shape how it is rolled out, and participate in the best sustainability forum in the apparel and footwear industry where they work alongside their peers in brands, retailers, manufacturers, raw materials providers and even NGOs, Governments and academics,” briefed Jason.
SAC also recommends a holistic management of social and environmental issues as issues relating to sustainability vary from place to place and company to company. “There is an unfortunate history of making progress on only one challenge at a time and then moving on to the next challenge before the first is solved. We believe that manufacturers should work with the Higg Index and improve their management on all of these issues by first working to achieve Higg Level 1 among the list of challenges and then building the capacity to improve and innovate,” insisted Jason.
SAC has typically grown by 15-20 per cent annually, but Jason does not believe this aggressive growth to be sustainable over the long-term.
