Thursday, July 29, 2010, 10:05pm PDT | Modified: July 29, 2010, 10:05 PM

Nike, Outdoor Industry Association launch eco-friendly indexes

by Erik Siemers
Business Journal Staff Writer

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Nau's Jamie Bainbridge

Separate sustainability initiatives driven by Portland companies could dramatically influence the apparel industry.

The Outdoor Industry Association — a Boulder, Colo.-based trade group — next week will roll-out of a beta version of the Eco Index, an open source, Web-based software tool to help designers gauge the environmental impact of their products.

It was designed by a working group of apparel companies with a heavy Portland influence, including leaders from Nau, Keen Inc., and Columbia Sportswear Co. The Portland Development Commission invested $40,000 in the project, which will be administered by the Zero Waste Alliance, a Portland-based nonprofit with experience in developing environmental indexes.

Meanwhile, Washington County-based apparel and footwear colossus Nike Inc. within the next year hopes to broaden its own internal software tool, called the Considered Index, and make it available to the entire apparel industry.

Both projects have a similar function and purpose.

The tools each require input from product designers on things such as material types, sourcing, waste, labor practices, and packaging, ultimately assigning a scores to the product.

The idea is to make designers cognizant of how they choose materials while creating transparency between manufacturers and suppliers, influencing how companies manufacture products.

“It teaches them in real time how to make smarter choices at the beginning of the process,” said Nike spokeswoman Kate Meyers.

Tracing the environmental footprint of apparel isn’t a new concept for the industry.

Other than Nike, major apparel brands such as Patagonia have also developed internal eco-indices. New Zealand-based apparel brand Icebreaker, which has its North American headquarters in Portland, allows consumers to trace their merino wool back to the farm.

But Nike’s Considered Index and the outdoor industry’s Eco Index both represent ambitious efforts to stretch the practice to a broader audience of manufacturers.

The key difference between them seems to be in how they were developed.

Eco Index push began years ago

Work on the Eco Index began three years ago by the Outdoor Industry Association’s Eco Working Group, a collaboration of around 100 outdoor industry companies. The goal was to design a tool applicable to 90 percent of the products in the outdoor industry.

“We have an industry to corral,” said Jamie Bainbridge, director of textile development and sustainability at Nau, a Portland-based sustainable apparel brand.

Bainbridge is chair of the Eco Working Group’s Sustainability and Fair Labor Advisory Council. Next week, she will host training sessions at the Outdoor Retailer Summer Market in Salt Lake City, where a beta version of the Eco Index will be unveiled.

The Eco Working Group consists mostly of smaller companies that individually wouldn’t have the resources to undertake an internal index on their own. Bainbridge said conducting a life-cycle analysis can cost a company more than $100,000 per product.

As such, the Eco Index is open source and adaptable across industry segments, from makers of camping equipment to footwear.

“We don’t have the girth or the weight of a much bigger company to develop our own index,” said Sandra Cho, corporate responsibility manager at Washington County-based Columbia Sportswear. “We can use an open source kind of framework to start doing the work on a broader scale that we alone can achieve.”

In contrast, Nike’s Considered Index was developed over the last five years as a measurement and analysis tool for only Nike footwear and apparel products.

While designed as a internal tool, Meyers said the goal from the outset was to put the index through a peer review process with an eye on broadening its applicability.

“We could then map it out into a more universal tool that could be used more broadly outside of Nike and open source it,” Meyers said.

That effort is now underway: Meyers said Nike’s apparel index is in beta testing with a handful of industry peers the company wouldn’t identify.

Though the two index projects are developing in parallel, neither Nike nor the Portland companies linked to the Eco Index were willing to label them as competitors.

Instead, they hope to work with each other at some point.

“It would serve everyone best if it wasn’t positioned as a competitor,” Bainbridge said. “Hopefully, at the end of the day, there will be a collaborative way to incorporate elements of each other’s indexes.”

Telling the consumer

The consumer brands involved in the Outdoor Industry Association’s Eco Index project hope the environmental data they gather can be imparted to consumers.

Producing such an eco-tag, however, won’t happen for a long time, said Nau's Bainbridge.

“You’ve got to build the integrity before you produce a label,” Bainbridge said.

At the outset of the process, members cast a vote on whether the intent of the project would be to create a tool for internal industry use or to produce a consumer-facing label.

“It was a very strong vote to make it internal,” Bainbridge said.

The index needs to go through significant peer review and industry vetting to ensure that the process is applicable industry-wide, she added.

There is also a question of how the data would be displayed for consumers.

Bainbridge said the index scores individual categories — materials, distribution, packaging — independently and isn’t tallied into a sum. If published on a product label, the information would look more like the nutrition label on a cereal box than anything consumers might easily absorb inside a retail store.

“I think the whole industry would love to do this,” Bainbridge said of eco-labels. “We need to really understand what we’re doing before this would go on a product.”

esiemers@bizjournals.com | 503-219-3418