The Sustainable Apparel Coalition (SAC), a global industry coalition that is standardizing social and environmental sustainability performance measurement, launched the Higg Index Design and Development Module (DDM). The Higg DDM empowers product designers and developers to make sustainable choices at the earliest stage of apparel, footwear and textile prototype design.
“Product designers and developers’ choices can influence over 80% of the environmental impact created by a product,” said Jason Kibbey, CEO at the Sustainable Apparel Coalition. “Empowering them with credible information to make better choices in the early stages of product creation can benefit the people and communities where the products are made, consumers, and our environment as a whole.”
Designers have the most freedom to minimize eventual environmental impacts of the finished product at the earliest stage of the design process. The data collected through the Higg DDM, which replaces Higg’s Beta Rapid Design Module, helps steer them toward selecting lower impact materials, using more efficient construction techniques, and considering the complete life cycle of the product.
After completing a simple product assessment, the Higg DDM provides members with a single design score, making it easy to compare design concepts and make quick decisions before production. The Higg DDM provides useful benchmarking and analytics that allow users to compare products or defined groups of products to each other, to company averages, and to industry averages. Using the Higg DDM encourages continuous improvement by teaching designers and developers where they have the most control over the impact, and by giving rapid feedback on how to improve their score.
