What is Higg, what is the Higg Index, and what is SLCP?

Higg

A sustainability audit platform that helps you take responsibility for the impact of your entire product lifecycle - from materials to products, from factories to stores, from carbon emissions to working conditions. From audits to continuous improvement, accurately measure the environmental and social impact of a given product.

Higg Index

The Higg Index is a set of tools for standardizing the measurement of sustainability across the value chain and is at the heart of SAC’s mission to transform businesses to deliver exponential impact.

It consists of a core set of five tools that together assess the social and environmental performance of the value chain and the environmental impact of products, including the Higg Factory Environmental Module (FEM), the Higg Factory Social and Labor Module (FSLM), the Higg Brand and Retail Module (BRM), the Higg Material Sustainability Index (MSI) and the Higg Product Module (PM). In topics such as water use, carbon emissions and labor conditions, consumer brands, retailers, manufacturers, governments, NGOs and consumers can use the Higg Index to inform their individual sustainability strategies and drive collective industry transformation. Over the past decade, Higg has worked with SAC members, consultants, stakeholders and industry experts to develop the Higg Index methodology using the latest scientific research.

The Factory Environment Module (FEM) consists of seven parts: energy, greenhouse gas emissions, water, wastewater, sewage, exhaust emissions, waste and chemical management

Each impact (part) consists of a three-level structure

Level 1, Level 2 and Level 3

It reflects the general threshold for environmental practices. Generally (but not always) the answer to Level 3 is not “yes” unless both Level 1 and 2 questions are answered. However, there are prerequisites when you answer a question in the affirmative. In other words, if you have a Level 3 practice but no Level 1 practice, you will still receive a Level 3 score.

• Level 1 = Awareness, understanding, and baseline performance

• Level 2 = Planning and Management

• Level 3 = Implementing sustainable development measures/demonstrating performance and progress

There are no performance "thresholds" for the score evaluation of a facility (e.g., a range of "gold," "silver," "bronze"). It is up to each institution to determine how to interpret a facility's overall score.

After completing this module, you will have a better understanding of your environmental performance level. It is recommended that you use the module's three-level structure to guide your facility towards continuous improvement in environmental management.

Higg Factory Social and Labour Module (FSLM)

SLCP – Social and Labour Integration Project

SLCP falls under the category of social responsibility and can be done on three AHs (hosting platforms). The two are different platforms, and Higg is one of the hosting platforms (AHs) of SLCP.

HiggAH, you must link SLCPGateway to perform subsequent operations. If not, you cannot verify or share.

If the customer requires the factory to do SLCP, the factory can purchase and complete FSLM directly on HIGG, and needs to be associated with SLCPGateway.

SLCP certification (Social & Labor Convergence Project). It is the abbreviation of the Social & Labor Convergence Project, which is committed to supporting stakeholders in improving working conditions in global supply chains by creating and implementing a simple, unified and effective industry-wide converged assessment framework (CAF) for social and labor data collection. Compared with other compliance audits, this framework will be standard-neutral: the focus is on collecting factory performance data in a unified and reliable manner, thereby enabling data sharing and comparison across brands and organizations. The SLCP project focuses on social and labor aspects and consists of nine core topics: recruitment and employment, working hours, wages and benefits, employee treatment, employee participation, health and safety, termination of employment, management systems, labor welfare and social impacts.