After almost two years of collaboration V1 of the Apparel Index is ready for testing and publicly available at www.apparelcoalition.org.  The Index is an industry-wide tool for measuring the environmental and social performance of apparel products and the supply chains that produce them.  The Sustainable Apparel Coalition welcomes comments and feedback on the tool to continue to improve it.

The goal of the Apparel Coalition is to lead the industry toward a shared vision of sustainability. This first version of the Index was developed with involvement of a wide range of stakeholders, and the metrics are fully transparent to encourage broad adoption of the Index globally. To accomplish this, the Coalition has drawn upon decades of work from different efforts to measure and track apparel sustainability including the Outdoor Industry Association “Eco Index” and Nike’s “Environmental Apparel Design” tools.

Each of the Coalition’s participating companies and organizations see an opportunity to advance their own sustainability goals by collaborating to create more uniform, broadly defined tools for measuring sustainability, and for collective actions to drive innovations in products and manufacturing that will benefit the entire apparel industry and consumers.

Congratulations to all the members of the Apparel Coalition who have put so much into making the Index a reality!