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OUTDOOR RETAILER SUMMER & ODI
JUNE 17-19, 2024

OUTDOOR RETAILER WINTER & ODI
NOVEMBER 6-8, 2024

SALT PALACE CONVENTION CENTER
SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH

Dec 1, 2022 | Magazine News

THE GREEN DREAM
By Berne Broudy


Going climate positive is the future for outdoor manufacturers, but how that impacts design and product development remains to be seen.


For years, carbon neutrality has been the holy grail, the goal towards which businesses that care about and depend on nature for their bottom line have set their sights. But the climate continues to warm (the past seven years were the warmest on record according to the United Nations) and many manufacturers continue to greenwash their efforts and make empty eco claims.

So, business leaders committed to reigning in their companies’ social and environmental impacts have felt compelled to develop more meaningful goals and strategies. Concerned brands are striving not just to for climate neutrality but to achieve a net positive impact on the planet. It’s an ambitious goal, a quest both necessary and urgent, that takes into account design and materials, manufacturing, energy, water, and the social impact of manufacturing any product.

Through Outdoor Industry Association’s Climate Action Corps, 100 outdoor companies are pioneering a collaborative model to accelerate science-based climate action and influence policy. OIA has announced its goal for the outdoor industry to become the world’s first climate-positive industry by 2030.

 

What is Climate Positivity

OIA defines climate positivity as “reducing your greenhouse gas emissions in line with a science-based target that addresses all scopes, to remove more GHG from the atmosphere than you emit, and to advocate for broader systemic change.” This is an important shift in strategy.

“Climate positivity is tied to all resources used to make a product that affects the climate, biodiversity, and the social fabric,” says Dr. Gayatri Keskar, vice president of research at Material ConneXion, a leading material insights company. “You can’t just replace plastic with paper. That creates a new challenge. Designing with climate-positive materials you need to micro-manage the entire design, development, and production process using a climate lens, not just the carbon lens.”

 

Impact on Design and Manufacturing

According to Keskar, the three stages of the product development cycle include raw materials — beginning of life, useful life (including repaired or re-used life), and end of life. To be carbon positive, a company needs to consider all three, as well as the manufacturing process and resulting emissions.

Cam Bresinger, founder and president of Nemo says his company has found that circularity is vital. The factory energy used to make tents and sleeping bags is astoundingly more resource-intensive than reclaiming a product at the end of its useful life.

“Nemo is launching a vetted recycling pathway for sleeping bag reselling and recycling as part of its climate plus strategy,” says Theresa McKenney, Nemo’s director of sustainability. “We’re not taking plastics and turning them into fuel. We’re turning fabric polymer into a resin that can be used as raw material in another project. With composite products, we’re pursuing chemical recycling that’s more permissive in its feedstock requirements.”

By January 2023, Rossignol’s four factories, which its parent company owns, will be powered by renewable energy. Rossignol Group companies now assess all aspects of their business through the lens of its Respect program. This considers the environmental and social impacts of making gear. Nick Castagnoli, brand marketing director, says, “We’ve killed projects well into the development cycle when a product had negative life cycle analysis. But we’ve proven we can make hardgoods that are durable, high performance, and low impact.”

“Chemical management is a key part of the equation,” says Patrick McCluskey, product sustainability chief engineer at Nemo. “When a factory applies polyurethane coatings, if they don’t have multimillion-dollar air scrubbers, solvents—volatile environmental compounds that are significant greenhouse gases—are released into the air. The impact per kilogram is high.”

Nemo is working with its factories and with Bluesign to address this issue. “But,” says McCluskey, “even if we swapped every material in our line to preferred material we wouldn’t hit our target carbon as a brand. The energy mix in southeast Asian factories is primarily coal. Eighty-seven percent of brand emissions happen before the product leaves the factory. To be climate positive, transitioning to renewable energy is key.”

 

Collaboration with Competitors

Rossignol is sharing strategies and practices to lower impact with its competitors. “The gloves are off,” says Castagnoli. “It’s freeing and terrifying and challenging all at the same time.”

Smartwool is on the same path. In conjunction with OIA, the Colorado-based brand set a goal to be climate positive by 2030 through systemic change—reducing farm emissions and transitioning to recycled synthetics while it searches out renewable materials. And it’s advocating for other brands to follow suit.

“It’s a lofty aspiration,” says Alicia Chin, Smartwool’s senior manager of sustainability and social impact. “Circularity, climate positivity, extending product, and material lifecycles are all part of becoming climate positive. We want to build product that’s loved and lasts. And we want to share what we learn.”

Smartwool is testing and learning with a circularity partner. “Once we crack the code, we hope to share the details of our yarn supply with other brands including our competitors,” says Chin. “I hope we can come together as an industry to show what can be done. No one wins when companies develop cutting-edge sustainability technology and keep it to themselves.”

 

Climate Positive by Design

Climate-positive materials will ultimately allow more design freedom. “Standard manufacturing limits raw materials processing,” says Keskar. “With bio-manufacturing, for example, designers will be able to create forms and shapes not available with standard manufacturing. That can reduce resource use across the board.”

But changing the product design and development process won’t be without challenges. “If the next generation of renewable materials is made from protein or algae,” says Keskar, “it will necessitate new infrastructure to scale production and make those materials affordable.”

Creating meaningful change will also require getting consumers on board. “We’re developing partnerships and pipelines where products can be recycled easily,” says Castagnoli. “We’re learning with our commercial and retail partners, who have the same goals and sensitivities, how to communicate with consumers coming into the store, how to incentivize bringing product back at the end of its life.”

If climate positivity is to be real, there needs to be a certifiable standard to serve as a B.S. detector and to prevent greenwashing. Empty claims like solution dyeing won’t cut it. Climate positivity requires transparency, truth, and accountability.

“We’re a for-profit business, and we make things, and we’re constantly trying to make them better,” says Bresinger. “When we use our planet’s resources, we’re never getting them back. That plucks a heartstring.”

Become part of the solution – learn more about the OIA Climate Action Corps.


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