Becoming Climate Neutral Certified: Our Journey
For sure, you might have heard about climate change, global warming, and all the external factors that have an impact on them; as well as the influence that humans have to make either a positive or negative contribution on those aspects.
But how does that relate to us? The majority of the things we do need energy: driving cars, heating and cooling our houses, or even cooking our food. Additionally, all the technology innovations and the fact that humanity is looking towards the future gave us incredible results such as lower mortality, and some anticipated and undesirable consequences as the Greenhouse Effect. Burning fossil fuels puts gases into the air, gets trapped by the atmosphere, and causes the earth to be warmer.
Maybe not that common but growing more and more you will hear a conversation around “being carbon neutral” or “CO2 emissions associated with the production of a certain product”. In the last couple of years, we can admit that the matter was put on the table and discussed by many people including our customers of course. And that’s how we at Innerforce started to plan a major shift in our mindset and production processes to become a Climate Neutral Certified Company.
First of all, what is Climate Neutral?
Climate Neutral is the standard earned by companies that reduce and offset all of their greenhouse emissions. Although it was not an easy journey, we are more than proud to announce we are now officially a Climate Neutral Certified Brand.
We wanted to do things differently, showing the real process and motivating others while doing it. We also knew that we needed more actions and less words. That’s why after a year of hard-work, we are here to share our journey with you. But beware, this doesn’t end right here, this is just the first step.
You can’t make decisions, without information.
We started on this path towards the end of last year when we became carbon neutral as an organization. We did this by measuring the impact of each one of our employees and offsetting our collective emissions. Since we are doing remote work we thought it was a good idea to estimate emissions for our individual lifestyles which in return would also give us a good sense of where we can do better and commit to individual reduction plans.
But going Climate Neutral means going past our individual lifestyle choices and all the way to the impact of our production and life cycle of our products. So in order to get certified we went on and measured all of our carbon emissions, including our production process, the buying of materials, logistics, and even the labels we print to ship our products to you. The result of this was an estimate of our full carbon footprint.
In our case we used a calculation tool provided by Climate Neutral called Bee which is a phenomenal resource for companies at our stage who otherwise would struggle to pay consultants to calculate all three scopes. In order to measure the carbon footprint, you need to be able to identify scopes 1, 2 and 3 emissions.
The average carbon footprint of one of our 2020 items is 63,47kg. Now we know where we stand, and you know too. We will do better.
Our commitment to reducing our emissions at Innerforce for 2021.
Now that we have a benchmark we can work towards reduction of all avoidable emissions.
Our goals for 2021 are:
- Shift our entire production to Spain to control every single part of the process and shorten the distances between world-class suppliers, production, and clients.
- Significant changes in our packaging, moving onto compostable bags for both products and mailer bags and abandoning single-use plastic bags with devastating effects on the environment.
- A commitment to sustainable fabrics. We are committing to at least 50% of our used materials to be sourced sustainably by the end of the year.
Even then, we will have more to do. The journey towards sustainability is not one with a clear finish line. Just as with personal development, this one is a path of constant improvement and striving for better practices.
We taxed ourselves for the remaining emissions.
Although we have already made meaningful changes inside and outside our company, no business today can reduce their emissions to zero, so in the meantime, we can offset those unavoidable emissions. Carbon offsets occur when you pay someone to remove carbon from the atmosphere (or prevent it from getting there in the first place).
With the support of Climate Neutral we decided to compensate for our footprint through a variety of nature-based and infrastructure projects which are independently audited with a verifiable impact.
All our products are Climate Neutral.
You’ll find this label on our products. Labels tell us important things about the stuff we get, like where it came from or who made it. Our label also means we are taking responsibility for what we do and the way in which we do it in a measurable, consistent, and verifiable way.
----------
We want to encourage other brands out there to join us in this movement. To transform themselves into sustainable brands, it’s not only right but also good business. If you own a business yourself or know someone who does so, and are interested in learning more about our path feel free to reach out.
Becoming Climate Neutral Certified: Our Journey
For sure, you might have heard about climate change, global warming, and all the external factors that have an impact on them; as well as the influence that humans have to make either a positive or negative contribution on those aspects.
But how does that relate to us? The majority of the things we do need energy: driving cars, heating and cooling our houses, or even cooking our food. Additionally, all the technology innovations and the fact that humanity is looking towards the future gave us incredible results such as lower mortality, and some anticipated and undesirable consequences as the Greenhouse Effect. Burning fossil fuels puts gases into the air, gets trapped by the atmosphere, and causes the earth to be warmer.
Maybe not that common but growing more and more you will hear a conversation around “being carbon neutral” or “CO2 emissions associated with the production of a certain product”. In the last couple of years, we can admit that the matter was put on the table and discussed by many people including our customers of course. And that’s how we at Innerforce started to plan a major shift in our mindset and production processes to become a Climate Neutral Certified Company.
First of all, what is Climate Neutral?
Climate Neutral is the standard earned by companies that reduce and offset all of their greenhouse emissions. Although it was not an easy journey, we are more than proud to announce we are now officially a Climate Neutral Certified Brand.
We wanted to do things differently, showing the real process and motivating others while doing it. We also knew that we needed more actions and less words. That’s why after a year of hard-work, we are here to share our journey with you. But beware, this doesn’t end right here, this is just the first step.
You can’t make decisions, without information.
We started on this path towards the end of last year when we became carbon neutral as an organization. We did this by measuring the impact of each one of our employees and offsetting our collective emissions. Since we are doing remote work we thought it was a good idea to estimate emissions for our individual lifestyles which in return would also give us a good sense of where we can do better and commit to individual reduction plans.
But going Climate Neutral means going past our individual lifestyle choices and all the way to the impact of our production and life cycle of our products. So in order to get certified we went on and measured all of our carbon emissions, including our production process, the buying of materials, logistics, and even the labels we print to ship our products to you. The result of this was an estimate of our full carbon footprint.
In our case we used a calculation tool provided by Climate Neutral called Bee which is a phenomenal resource for companies at our stage who otherwise would struggle to pay consultants to calculate all three scopes. In order to measure the carbon footprint, you need to be able to identify scopes 1, 2 and 3 emissions.
The average carbon footprint of one of our 2020 items is 63,47kg. Now we know where we stand, and you know too. We will do better.
Our commitment to reducing our emissions at Innerforce for 2021.
Now that we have a benchmark we can work towards reduction of all avoidable emissions.
Our goals for 2021 are:
- Shift our entire production to Spain to control every single part of the process and shorten the distances between world-class suppliers, production, and clients.
- Significant changes in our packaging, moving onto compostable bags for both products and mailer bags and abandoning single-use plastic bags with devastating effects on the environment.
- A commitment to sustainable fabrics. We are committing to at least 50% of our used materials to be sourced sustainably by the end of the year.
Even then, we will have more to do. The journey towards sustainability is not one with a clear finish line. Just as with personal development, this one is a path of constant improvement and striving for better practices.
We taxed ourselves for the remaining emissions.
Although we have already made meaningful changes inside and outside our company, no business today can reduce their emissions to zero, so in the meantime, we can offset those unavoidable emissions. Carbon offsets occur when you pay someone to remove carbon from the atmosphere (or prevent it from getting there in the first place).
With the support of Climate Neutral we decided to compensate for our footprint through a variety of nature-based and infrastructure projects which are independently audited with a verifiable impact.
All our products are Climate Neutral.
You’ll find this label on our products. Labels tell us important things about the stuff we get, like where it came from or who made it. Our label also means we are taking responsibility for what we do and the way in which we do it in a measurable, consistent, and verifiable way.
----------
We want to encourage other brands out there to join us in this movement. To transform themselves into sustainable brands, it’s not only right but also good business. If you own a business yourself or know someone who does so, and are interested in learning more about our path feel free to reach out.
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