Higg Partners With BLUESIGN And ZDHC To Enhance Chemical Management Transparency

Higg Partners With BLUESIGN And ZDHC To Enhance Chemical Management Transparency

In certain industries, success in sustainability strategies depends on the ability to generate customer trust. ESG data complexities, however, often hinder firms' ability to understand their sustainability impact, resulting in weak ESG strategies and exposing organizations to higher reputational and compliance risk. To allow firms to overcome ESG data challenges, Higg – a sustainability insights platform for the consumer goods industry – has recently announced partnerships with Bluesign and Zero Discharge of Hazardous Chemicals (ZDHC) to boost chemical management transparency. The collaboration will expand Higg’s data sources available on the Higg platform, helping global retailers and manufacturers towards the use of more sustainable and safer chemicals.

Although there is a wide range of legislation on the subject, chemical management remains a complex challenge, with increasing number of stakeholders requesting full transparency on operations' chemical footprints. However, few firms have full visibility into chemical workflows and processes. For example, managing textile chemicals involves a variety of functions in many facilities, frequently resulting in gaps in data accuracy, duplicate data entries, and ineffective communication between buyers and suppliers. Through these new developing partnerships, Higg aims to facilitate communication and data sharing between facilities and brands and retailers on chemical management, giving platform users access to clear and harmonized information on their environmental and social impact performance. As a result, value chain partners will be able to identify hot spots for improving chemical management, reducing environmental and human health risks, and boosting industry knowledge on the best practices to support more sustainable and responsible chemical management.  

Higg’s developing partnerships with Bluesign and ZDHC are a good example of the crucial collaboration between industry parties to enhance social and environmental data transparency. In areas where assessment limitations pose a threat to the credibility of ESG commitments, industry partnerships are essential to harmonize data, generate knowledge on sustainability best practices, and protect market competitiveness on sustainability efforts. Hence, these collaborations between Higg with Bluesign and ZDHC are not only good news for the textile industry, but also set a good example of ESG data-based collaborations, which are fundamental to driving collective change and sustainable action quickly at global scale.