Durham, NC - The Sustainable Apparel Coalition on Thursday released the index, which measures the environmental and social impacts of products.

Jay Golden
Director of the Duke Center for Sustainability & Commerce at the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions; associate professor of the practice for sustainable systems analysis, Duke University.
jay.golden@duke.edu
http://center.sustainability.duke.edu/people

Golden was the founder and former co-director of the Walmart-led Sustainability Consortium, an organization dedicated to making goods and products more sustainable. At Duke, he led the international group of academics in the technical review for both the Nike Material Sustainability Index and the Higg Index.

Quotes:
"The release of the Higg Index marks a transition point for global commerce. Companies no longer are simply striving to promote all the good things they do for the environment, their employees and the communities they are in. Now, businesses must quantify the level of environmental impact of their goods and services."

"With this tool, we are one major step closer to the day sustainability is no longer a nebulous term that cannot be uniformly and scientifically evaluated. In industry, those who do not understand and implement the technical and organizational innovations risk losing substantial business. For the consumer, they will see new product designs and, in the near future, be empowered through a product sustainability label to make a purchase based on costs, performance and the level of sustainability of a product and brand."