About this document. This guidance was prepared in 2026 as a good-faith effort to document how the Higg platform calculated the FEM 2020 energy, greenhouse gas, water, waste and refrigerant values. FEM 2020 predates the calculation model maintained by Cascale today: the platform applied its own conversion factors and emission factors and wrote the results back into the assessment as answers, where data consumers see them next to the facility’s own answers. What follows is reconstructed from the FEM 2020 question and answer definitions, from those stored results across 16,504 assessments, and from the release history. It may not accurately describe all platform behaviour, in particular edge cases that leave no trace in the data. Statements derived from the data rather than from a specification are marked observed, with the number of filings behind them.

Water Data

Facilities flagged each water source used (yes/no/unknown per source) and then reported the annual quantity and unit for each source they track. Water is reported for the site as a whole; there is no facility-type or domestic/production split in FEM 2020.

Units are one of ccf, cuFt, cuYard, gal, liter, m3 and ml. The platform converted every quantity to litres with the factors below (observed as total ÷ quantity):

Note on “Ml”. The unit displayed as “Ml” (megalitres) was converted as 0.001 litres, that is as millilitres, in every FEM cadence through 2022. A facility reporting 5 Ml of water had 0.005 litres counted.

Water Aggregates

watsource[source]total — litres from one source.

No withdrawal/recycled split was published in FEM 2020; every source counts towards the single total.

watsourcetotaltotal — litres across all eight sources. Observed to equal the sum of its components in 96% of 12,831 filings.

watsourcetotalperday — watsourcetotaltotal divided by the operating days watopdays. Observed to equal the sum of its components in 100% of 12,815 filings.

Waste Data

Waste is reported by stream, split into non-hazardous and hazardous streams, each with a quantity and a unit.

Non-hazardous streams

Hazardous streams

Non-hazardous streams accept mass units only (g, kg, lb, oz, tonMetric, tonShort); hazardous streams also accept volume units (barrels, ccf, cuFt, cuYard, gal, liter, m3, ml).

The platform converted each quantity to kilograms with these factors (observed). Volume units of hazardous waste convert as if the waste had the density of water (1 litre = 1 kg), the “barrels (16 kg/ea)” unit counts 16 kg per barrel, and “Ml” has the same millilitre reading as for water.

Waste Aggregates

wstsource[stream]total — kilograms of one stream.

No hazardous / non-hazardous subtotals were published in FEM 2020.

wstsourcetotal — kilograms across every stream. Observed to equal the sum of its components in 90% of 13,055 filings.