Outdoor Industry Association urges brands to commit to sustainability.

• Author: Biton, Adva
• Position: Around Utah

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Salt Lake City -- As more and more people head outside to hike, paddleboard, swim, ski and otherwise enjoy the outdoors, the focus of the retailers outfitting those enthusiasts has turned to sustainability. THE OUTDOOR INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION (OIA) developed and unveiled a tool that helps company understand where they are in the industry in regards to their sustainability endeavors: the Higg Index.

The need for the tool grew out of necessity, said Nikki Hodgson, corporate responsibility manager for OIA. Change, innovation and improvement on an industry level was not feasible without a way to tangibly measure where brands, facilities and products existed in relation to each other.

"Inherently, our values as an industry are around environmental stewardship and community. We manufacture products that help us get outdoors, but there is definitely an impact in manufacturing," said Hodgson. "A number of individuals and companies started to get together to talk about this and start to answer those questions: what exactly is that environmental impact, and how can we improve it? We found there were great initiatives around the individual company level, with innovation and environmental management and responsibility--but I don't think we had a clear idea exactly how you measure that and how to communicate that to one another, to our business partners, and to our consumers."

So the OIA and partners developed the Higg Index, an online platform that is "Match.com meets Facebook," according to Betsy Blaisdell-Shepard, VP of product at the SUSTAINABLE APPAREL COALITION. "It's an opportunity for you to measure your performance throughout any part of the life cycle of your products and connect with your peers to see how you're doing with that, how you do against your peers or how your suppliers are performing for you," she said.

The Higg platform is a suite of tools that covers every part of the supply chain, from product design and creation, brand strategy to factory performance, material impacts, retail impacts and product footprinting. The tools are set in three categories: brand-level management, facility-level measurement and product-level management. The tool looks at both...