Dive Brief:
- Digital platform and sustainable solutions provider Glimpact launched an online tool Thursday that allows companies in the fashion industry to measure and assess the environmental impact of their products and offers guidance on how to reduce their climate footprint.
- The Global Impact Score, which is free to use, bases its calculations off the Product Environmental Footprint framework — a standardized, science-based method for assessing the environmental impact of a product throughout its entire life cycle, from raw material extraction to disposal. The method is also adopted and backed by the European Commission.
- Due to its alignment with the PEF framework, the tool will also allow American brands to prepare for and comply with the European Union’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation.
Dive Insight:
The Global Impact Score analyses the impact of any product by evaluating 16 environmental indicators: climate change; fine particle emissions; water resource depletion; exhaustion of non-renewable fossil and mineral resources; land use; ozone depletion; photochemical ozone formation; soil acidification; ionizing radiation; terrestrial, marine and freshwater eutrophication; human carcinogenic and non-carcinogenic toxicity; and freshwater eco toxicity.
Once the product has been evaluated against these categories, the tool generates a single score that is to be “understood as a sort of environmental price,” according to Glimpact.
Companies can use this score to determine how to make adjustments to how they source materials and produce garments and apparel, as well as alter other variables that will accelerate the fashion industry’s progress toward an ecological transition.
The tool also helps fashion brands based in the U.S. to align with global sustainability regulations such as the EU’s ESPR. The bloc formally adopted the regulation last year, which introduced sustainability requirements related to durability, a product’s environmental footprint and ease of repair, reuse and upgradability. The ecodesign regulation also requires products to have a digital product passport embedded with information on how the product was made.
“We launched the Global Impact Score to make the EU’s Product Environmental Footprint method accessible to all fashion and apparel stakeholders, especially those in the U.S., where awareness of ESPR is still growing,” Glimpact CEO Christophe Girardier told ESG Dive in emailed comments.
“ESPR and other similar legislation is a groundbreaking step forward in global sustainability,” Girardier added. “Having access to a shared scientific standard such as the PEF model helps eliminate greenwashing and makes environmental impact as measurable and transparent as any other product metric.”
Last month, the European Commission adopted its five-year working plan for implementing legislation outlined in ESPR. The plan — which prioritized textiles, especially clothing — laid down specific requirements for product labeling and design. These requirements include minimum standards for a product’s durability and recycled content, as well as mandatory digital product passports. For clothing in particular, the requirements need to be adopted in 2027, and apply to all products placed on the European market, regardless of their country of origin, or the size of the company producing them, according to the Commission’s 2025-2030 plan.
