What is the Higg Index? The fashion industry's footprint tool, and why its shopper labels were paused

The Higg Index is a suite of tools the fashion industry uses to measure environmental and social impact across its supply chain. Cascale, the nonprofit formerly called the Sustainable Apparel Coalition (SAC), owns it, and the tools run on the Worldly platform. It was built for brands, factories and designers, not for shoppers, and a 2022 ruling in Norway turned on that distinction.

Who runs it and who uses it

Cascale describes itself as a global nonprofit alliance across the consumer goods industry, aimed at combating climate change and supporting decent work, and says its approach is "powered by the Higg Index Tools," accessed by 40,000 users worldwide. Its stated target includes an industry-wide 45 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. These are the organization's own claims, read on its site on October 23, 2026.

Wikipedia dates the first public release of the Higg Index to July 2012 under the SAC, and says Walmart and Patagonia founded the coalition. It lists five tools: the Facility Environmental Module, the Facility Social and Labor Module, the Brand and Retail Module, the Materials Sustainability Index (MSI) and the Product Module (PM). Cascale says the tools can be accessed through Worldly without Cascale membership.

What the product tools measure

Two of the five tools matter most for clothes. Cascale says the Higg MSI helps users understand the extraction and production impacts of materials such as textiles, plastics, metal and leather, built on life cycle assessment data. The Higg Product Module goes further, measuring cradle to grave impacts of consumer goods "from the point of resource extraction to manufacturing, all the way through durability, care, and end of use."

The product tools report on greenhouse gas footprint, nutrient pollution in water, water scarcity, fossil fuel resource use and chemistry, and also report biogenic carbon content and water consumption. Cascale's FAQ says the main background data source for the MSI is Sphera's Managed LCA Content database, formerly known as GaBi, supplemented by primary data that manufacturers submit.

Where it went wrong: Norway, 2022

The index has been criticized for its data and its transparency since at least 2022. Wikipedia notes a New York Times article by Hiroko Tabuchi that June argued the index was rating synthetics as the most sustainable choice. Then-CEO Amina Razvi called that assumption incorrect, and said the SAC's communication guidelines prohibit brands from making comparisons across material types, per Wikipedia.

The sharper problem was marketing. WWD reported that the SAC launched a consumer transparency program in May 2021 that showed Higg MSI impact data in "sustainability profiles" piloted online by H&M and Norrøna. Norway's consumer authority opened a probe of Norrøna on Valentine's Day 2022, and in June concluded that Norrøna's marketing "by using data from the Higg MSI, is misleading to consumers and thus prohibited" under Norway's Marketing Control Act. It asked Norrøna to change or remove the marketing, which appeared on organic cotton T-shirts, before August 14, and issued similar warnings to H&M.

"When the clothing industry and others use environmental claims in marketing, it is important that the environmental claims are correct," said Trond Rønningen, the authority's director.

On June 27, 2022 the SAC paused the consumer-facing program globally, and WWD reported it would commission a third-party audit of the Higg MSI data and methodology, the last having been in 2016. The partners it listed included PVH, Zalando, Amazon, C&A, Columbia Sportswear, Puma and Salomon.

What Cascale says about sharing results now

Cascale's product tools page says it provides guidelines on sharing Higg performance in any business to business or business to consumer communications. We did not find a statement on the pages we read that the paused consumer program has been reactivated, so we cannot say it has. The practical lesson is the one the SAC drew in 2022: converting life cycle data into a claim about a single garment is harder than measuring it.

Why a footprint is hard to turn into a claim

Cascale's own FAQ shows the modeling choices behind a score. For circularity, it says the Higg Product Module credits actions a company has actually taken, such as recycling or repair programs, and that recycled materials and previously used products are modeled using the cut-off approach, while first life materials and products are allocated the full manufacturing impacts. Those are reasonable methods for comparing a company's choices over time. They are also exactly the kind of assumption that does not survive on a hang tag, where a shopper sees one number and none of the method.

How to read a Higg figure

First, ask what the number compares. A material score is a model, not a lab result, and a comparison across fibers is the exact use the SAC said its guidelines forbid. Second, ask who produced it. Brands can use the tools internally and share results, which makes a brand's Higg figure a company claim unless someone independent verified it. Third, check the date, because the methodology and the databases behind it are updated.

For the legal setting, regulators are now writing rules that go after unsupported green claims directly, and we cover one of them in our report on the EU greenwashing rule and the FTC Green Guides. Our explainer on what sustainable fashion means covers labels shoppers can check themselves.

Our take

The Higg Index is useful where it was designed to be useful: giving a factory or a design team a common way to compare options and track change. It is a poor basis for a swing tag. The 2022 Norwegian decision did not say the data was worthless. It said a brand cannot turn that data into a consumer promise without being sure the promise is accurate. Read any Higg-based claim as a brand's estimate, and ask for the method.