Impact

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Reducing our impact means we have to understand it first. In 2018, we commissioned CO2 and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) Reports to understand our footprint and use it as a benchmark for change.

CO2 Report

This report measures the overall carbon dioxide and equivalent greenhouse gases (CO2-eq) emitted by us per year. It comes from locations we operate directly, like our HQ and retail stores, but also from business-related travel.

The bigger we get, the more CO2-eq we’ll generate, which is why we track our average emissions per frame, dividing our overall emissions by how many frames we’ve sold per year. It’s called like-for-like reporting and it’ll help us tackle important issues, from the supply chain, to retail and beyond.

We’re already implementing changes, like running our HQ and stores on green energy. You can read more about it on the Company page.

An average frame’s emissions equals:

106 cups of coffee or almost 3 t-shirts

We emitted 310,03 tons of CO2-eq in 2018, which equals:

342 return flights from Amsterdam to New York or 9,689 pairs of jeans

LCA

The LCA measures the damaging effect of a frame’s entire life cycle, from raw material to the moment it’s thrown away. It doesn’t involve the user phase, or non-direct emissions, such as business travel and it analyses 5 metrics: CO2-eq, toxicity, phosphate, use of non-renewable resources and use of water.

We looked at the life cycle of two of our most popular frames: Neil and Pierce (one metal, one acetate), so we can track a product that’s always available to our customers and make effective adjustments. For one Neil frame, 3.96kg of CO2-eq is generated, while Pierce creates 6.73kg of CO2-eq per frame.

Innovations like bio acetate and recycling waste is something we’re already developing (if you missed it, read this), but we’re always working to get better. We’ll publish a new report annually, so we can all see how we’re doing.

*Carbon dioxide and equivalent greenhouse gases