Компания Coats сократила выбросы на 50% и внедрила стандарт Higg FEM в цепочку поставок

Coats® (LSE: COA) is a world-leading Tier 2 manufacturer and trusted partner for the apparel and footwear industries, using Higg FEM to measure environmental performance, engage suppliers, and advance circularity across global operations. Coats® (LSE: COA) is a world-leading Tier 2 manufacturer and trusted partner for the apparel and footwear industries. The company delivers essential materials, components, and software solutions that help its customers grow, compete, and win. Present in more than 50 countries and with a complex global supply chain, Coats has embedded sustainability into its business strategy — recognizing that consistent measurement and collaboration are essential to reducing environmental impacts and supporting long-term growth. Details in this case study are derived from Coats’ 2025 Sustainability Report and a Cascale “Source of Good” podcast interview with Chris Dearing, vice president of sustainability. “The Higg FEM gives us a consistent, externally validated format for communicating environmental performance at facility level, providing greater transparency and credibility for the brands and Tier 1 customers we supply,” Dearing said. Key Takeaways - Coats is using the Higg FEM to drive consistent, transparent environmental performance measurement across its global facilities. - After efficiency gains led to a plateau in emissions reduction, Coats pivoted to structural interventions like onsite solar and renewable energy, resulting in a >50 percent reduction in Scope 1 and 2 emissions from 2019 levels. - Coats has extended the Higg FEM framework to its strategic suppliers to promote standardized data collection and collaborative decarbonization. - Circularity is a growing focus, with Coats incorporating recycled content into products like T2T Epic™ thread and Rhenoprint™ footwear components. Beyond Efficiency Early in Coats’ decarbonization journey, the company made meaningful progress through energy efficiency improvements — optimizing boiler operations, reducing heat loss, optimizing compressed air systems, and tightening energy management across its global manufacturing network. Over time, however, Coats’ internal sustainability data showed that Scope 1 and 2 emissions were beginning to plateau. The efficiency gains that had supported the company’s early progress were no longer enough to sustain momentum toward its science-based targets. Analysis from Coats’ in-house sustainability platform, which manages data from more than 60 business units, helped the company identify where progress had slowed and where more structural interventions were required. These included onsite solar generation, renewable electricity sourcing, and fuel-switching projects designed to reduce reliance on carbon-intensive energy sources. Building on this internal analysis, the Higg FEM, which is governed by Cascale and delivered through Worldly’s global technology platform, provided Coats with a recognized and externally validated framework for communicating facility-level performance consistently to brands and Tier 1 customers. This strengthened transparency, comparability and confidence in the company’s environmental performance. The results were significant. By 2025, Coats had reduced Scope 1 and 2 emissions by more than 50 percent from a 2019 baseline — a direct outcome of using consistent data to guide strategic decision-making. As Dearing explained, “The Higg FEM gave us a consistent way to measure environmental performance across our sites. Once we had that foundation, we could start engaging suppliers using the same framework.” Extending Measurement Across the Value Chain As Coats strengthened environmental performance within its own operations, the company recognized that achieving its longer-term climate ambitions would require the same rigor further up the value chain — where a significant proportion of environmental impacts occur. Coats expanded Higg FEM to strategic suppliers, giving both Coats and its suppliers a shared methodology for measuring facility-level environmental performance. The initiative supports Coats’ Supplier Decarbonisation Programme by helping suppliers understand their own emissions profiles, establish carbon inventories, and identify practical reduction opportunities. With a common framework in place, conversations between Coats and its suppliers can focus on improvement rather than on reconciling different measurement approaches. This collaborative approach reflects a broader shift in how Coats approaches sustainability — from measuring direct operational impacts to driving improvements throughout the value chain. Embedding Circularity Into Product Innovation Coats is also applying sustainability principles to product innovation, with circularity becoming an increasingly important focus. The company has developed sewing threads containing recycled content and has launched its T2T Epic™ and T2T Gramax™ 100% recycled polyester threads, made from post-industrial and post-consumer textile waste to support textile-to-textile circularity. Rather than viewing recycled materials as a niche offering, Coats is working to incorporate circular principles into product development across multiple business segments. Following its acquisition of Texon and Rhenoflex, Coats has expanded these efforts into structural footwear components and premium accessories. Coats has also developed Rhenoprint™ RP Flow and RP Wave toe-box components, incorporating recycled content and more circular manufacturing approaches. Used in footwear applications such as toe puffs and heel counters, the product demonstrates how circular design principles can be applied to components that have traditionally relied on virgin materials — supporting customers’ own sustainability objectives while reducing waste across the value chain. A Foundation for What Comes Next Coats’ experience illustrates how standardized environmental data creates a foundation for sustained progress — moving from early efficiency gains to structural decarbonization, and from internal performance improvement to supply chain engagement. By using Higg FEM across its own operations and extending it to strategic suppliers, Coats has built a common language for sustainability performance that supports continuous improvement, strengthens supplier relationships, and enables more credible progress toward its SBTi-validated near-term and net-zero targets.