Kurt Kipka, chief impact officer at the Apparel Impact Institute, would be the first to admit he doesn’t want the environmental nonprofit’s latest tool to gain a “life of its own.”
Instead, he wants the Energy and Carbon Benchmark to serve as a voluntary reference point, one that allows textile facilities to break down their energy use by individual process—think knitting versus dyeing—rather than being graded as a single opaque unit. This shift to more granular data would make more “apples-to-apples” comparisons possible, Kipka noted.
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Still, Kipka knows that audit fatigue is a real phenomenon and that the industry has no appetite for another stand-alone tool. To drive widespread adoption, the Energy and Carbon Benchmark aims to “flip the process on its head,” setting a “stake in the ground” through expert-modeled benchmarks before tapping into systems that suppliers and buyers already use, like the Higg Facility Environmental Module and the Open Supply Hub, he said. In the longer run, the tool could function as a toggle-on option on similar platforms without adding a burdensome new layer of reporting.
Kipka credits Phil Patterson, managing director at Colour Connections Textile Consultancy and a member of Aii’s Climate Solutions Portfolio Advisory Council, for pushing for a consistent way of comparing decarbonization projects regardless of their location in the supply chain. By the time the organization determined how to assess these potential grantees for supply chain impact, it realized it had developed a useful way to gauge how facilities performed against industry standards, regional standards and, “ultimately, the processes that they’re creating,” he said.
The idea, Kipka added, is to complement information that’s already being collected but then “layer on” a process map that shows what specific functions are being conducted on site and the energy sources that are supporting them.
“It’s with that little bit of information that we’re able to manage all the updated calculations in the background,” he said. “There’s no need for further data to be gathered. It’s really more of a calculation methodology that allows us to ideally bolster some of the existing tools out there with a public and transparent process.”
The Energy and Carbon Benchmark lands at a moment when fashion’s planet‑warming emissions are still falling far short of ambitions. The sector’s carbon pollution jumped nearly 8 percent in 2023 from a year earlier, accounting for nearly 2 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas budget, Aii wrote in its latest report. Textile processing was the supply chain’s largest source of emissions, responsible for roughly 55 percent of the total.
The risk of business as usual—which is to say, limited and scattershot progress—could cut industry bottom lines by 34 percent by 2030 and as much as 67 percent by 2040, Aii said last month.
But the quality of the data that underpins many sourcing decisions could use a glow-up. Kipka said he hopes the tool will encourage suppliers and buyers to embrace metrics such as carbon and energy-efficiency performance and to begin allocating business based on those figures. It makes logical sense: If fashion wants to decarbonize, it needs to focus efforts where most of its emissions occur. All the “action,” he added, is at the factory level. And all that’s wanting, in most cases, is sufficient funding.
“So you might imagine a brand or even a trade group setting a target for themselves to work with facilities with X energy efficiency or carbon intensity that allows them to make real, reasonable and tactical progress toward goals that this industry has for itself,” he said. “At the same time, we’re also really excited about seeing where there are vast opportunities for improvement that Aii could help facilitate in partnership with brands, banks and other NGOs.”
Aii tested that collaborative approach in late 2025, rallying retailers such as H&M Group, American Eagle Outfitters, Gap Inc. and J.Crew Group and suppliers like Elevate and KPI Mills to participate in a benchmark pilot that touted the tool’s ability to measure performance based on a factory’s production reality.
“When it comes to industry decarbonization efforts, fashion historically hasn’t been able to clearly define what ‘good’ energy efficiency looks like,” Henrik Sundberg, climate impact lead at H&M Group, said in a statement. “Aii’s benchmark, created in partnership with the apparel sector, establishes those baselines backed by data.“
But beyond brand requirements, suppliers are also personally interested in seeing how they measure up against their peers. That “natural curiosity” alone, Kipka believes, will spur opt-ins. Aii’s biggest job, he added, is ensuring this is done respectfully and mindfully because “there’s nuance and context that needs to be accounted for with new information that has become available.”
For Kipka, the pilot confirmed Aii should focus on incorporating the benchmark within the current data ecosystem with help from a “really tactical” technical advisory committee. The group, which includes Patterson, Aii senior director of sustainability reporting Leonie Schmid and sustainability consultant Michael Sadowski, will review the Energy and Carbon Benchmark every six months.
“We also wanted to gather data that can inform the future calculations within the tool, and we’ve started to build in processes to our governance model that will allow us to do that in a transparent way, eventually understanding what the tipping point is when we have enough primary data to inform an update to the tool,” Kipka said.
