A new data measurement tool promises to give apparel and consumer goods companies a “much-needed foundation” for measuring the Scope 3 emissions of their product lines, sustainability data platform Worldly revealed at its customer forum in Munich on Thursday.
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“Until now, sustainability teams have been spending months mired in spreadsheets, trying to bring together multiple pieces of data about their products and their supply chains,” said Kevin Vranes, the Higg Index custodian’s chief product officer. “This tool enables them to automate these time-consuming, spreadsheet-based calculations, giving them an easily customizable experience where they do not have to start from scratch.”
Scope 3 emissions refer to climate-warming gases produced by a business’s indirect operations, such as suppliers, which can account for up to 90 percent of a value chain’s carbon footprint. Worldly’s new Product Impact Calculator, Vranes said, will help companies move beyond the more oblique spend-based Scope 3 accounting—which translates the financial value of a purchased good or service into emissions—to applying primary data from different Higg facility and materials tools. This will allow greater accuracy, since they’ll be using their own purchase orders and product specifications.
The tool, which is closely integrated with the Higg Facility Environmental Module and the recently rejiggered Higg Materials Sustainability Index , offers 38 default product impact models pre-loaded with data related to materials, product weight, manufacturing processes, packaging, logistics, product use and end-of-life impacts. The more information a company uploads, Vranes said, the more precise its Scope 3 emissions calculations will be.
The tool has already gone through its paces: Fourteen brands, including RuffWear and Outdoor Research, participated in a pilot program to test the tool and offer feedback. Their insights helped smooth out any kinks in the Product Impact Calculator.
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As legislation requiring businesses to report the climate-related impact of their supply chains begins to rear its head, Vranes said that the tool will allow firms to be audit-ready, since its methodology has limited-level assurance from Apex. Because some companies will be able to account for the majority of their Scope 3 emissions using the Product Impact Calculator alone, the crunched numbers will be able to “withstand regulatory scrutiny,” he added.
Beyond compliance, the tool can also model where product emissions originate so firms can identify hotspots and see where cutbacks are possible on a more granular level. It’s another way to fill up data gaps—an endemic issue that the Higg Materials Sustainability Index was criticized for glossing over in the past—which could help the industry pick up its laggardly pace toward its climate goals.
“With this data in hand, users can pinpoint the exact changes within their material sourcing, assembly and packaging that would yield the most impacts,” Vranes said. “The more comprehensive and actionable the data, the better positioned brands are to make informed decisions and drive real change to improve their environmental impact.”
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