Emissions

Climate target

Since everything else is pointless if the planet becomes a fiery inferno, the key measure of our progress is the carbon footprint. Our goal is to achieve the so-called net-zero in 2030: we must at least halve the emissions from our own operations by 2025 and the emissions from our supply chain by 2030. The year 2021 works as a baseline. In addition, the emissions that we can’t get rid of will be offset as usual.

The Scope of Emission Calculations

We include in our emissions those clearly a result of our business operations, meaning:

• The energy use of our building, waste, business travel and commuting
• The manufacturing and transport of our brand products
• Shipping of all orders from our webstore as well as packaging

So, the things currently excluded are:

• Logistics emissions from the transport compensated by the transport company themselves, we have thus far included only those we compensate for ourselves
• The emissions from manufacturing and transport of products made by other brands
• Use and end of use of products
• In addition we have at the moment excluded the energy used by our webstore servers, since the service provider only uses renewables or compensates for the emissions if that is not possible
• The point here is to not get stuck in fine-tuning the calculations, but using our finite resources on actually reducing the emissions.

Product Carbon Footprints

In addition, we have calculated the estimated product-level carbon footprints for the vast majority of the products manufactured for our own brands, in practice almost all textile products. The footprint is visible in the webstore. In the name of transparency, we have discussed in detail the calculation method that takes into account the used materials and the emissions from the energy use of the fabric and the final product’s countries of origin. The estimations have been made with the help of Compensate. The manufacturing of our brand products as a whole has been included in the company emissions baseline year 2021 retroactively.

Reducing Emissions: Energy Purchases

In 2022 we decided to start purchasing only Finnish wind power for the electricity needs of our premises. Prior to that, we were using nuclear power, which isn't much worse based on the lifecycle emissions and would therefore be a viable option. We did have a problem, however, with the energy provider that was making investments into fossil fuels simultaneously, so we decided to take our bucks somewhere else. In addition, there are solar panels on our rooftop, producing some 1-2% of the building's annually consumed energy.

Also since 2022 we’ve decided to purchase the corresponding amount of our district heating energy use in waste heat. Even though this waste heat does not technically heat our building, by buying our share of this recycled heat from the markets, it is supposedly incentivizing the production of more emission-free heating. The guarantees of origin ensure that no more waste heat is sold than is being produced.

If we may, a word on energy and emission calculations. We always calculate the emissions from energy according to the lifecycle emissions, instead of the specific emissions originating from the energy production. For example, even if no greenhouse gases are emitted from the use of solar panels, the production of the solar panels has caused emissions. These emissions are taken into account and that is why our emissions from the energy use are never going to be zero.

Reducing Emissions: Logistics

We know that our emissions are caused by basically two things: manufacturing products and shipping them to customers around the world. The latter is due to air freight, that we need to get rid of almost entirely. Right now we are looking into options to ship beyond the Atlantic in other ways.

Reducing Emissions: Production

Another big issue is the emissions from manufacturing. Since we are in charge of brand products that make up around half of our sales, we have a good opportunity to influence how they are made and do things a bit better. These products should be made with emission-free energy and from materials less nasty to the environment. In addition, our goal is to further focus the production to Europe, even though the transport from the factories to our warehouse is a fairly small amount of all our emissions.

Offsetting

From the beginning, we have in addition to calculating our emissions also started to offset them with Compensate. Some might call this self-deception, but we deemed it necessary to do something right away before our emission reductions become effective. This way we have a price tag to the negative externalities caused by our business, whereas ruining the atmosphere can be done free of charge in the current system. Getting a bill every year interestingly motivates us to reduce our carbon footprint. Compensate offers us an extensive report on where and how our money has been spent.