Asked to name a company that is raising its commitment to producing products that are more environmentally friendly or that are produced to higher ethical standards and Mountain Equipment may not spring to mind. Perhaps you would mention Marks & Spencer and their Plan A programme or Patagonia and their Common Threads policy
Yet as a relatively small company, and one whose staff use and love our natural environment, we are trying to make changes where we can; genuine and measureable changes that affect our environment and not simply sitting idly by.
For us, its part of our Twenty Things To Do programme, an internal programme to make changes to how we work that will impact on the environment and the people involved in everything to with our products. A wide ranging programme that includes everything from taking a personal interest in community projects such as cleaning a crag, collecting litter or repairing footpaths, to reducing energy consumption in our offices, reducing the amount of product or waste that goes to landfill, reducing the amount of products we ship via air to ensuring any animals involved in our raw materials are reared to humane standards and ensuring all our factory workers are treated fairly and paid a fair wage.
Making our product line more sustainable and more ecological is part of a wider long-term goal. It is not a sudden crusade to change everything we do, but about making incremental changes that will have a genuine impact on the environment around us and the people within it.
The development of the Earthrise™ Sleeping Bag has been about doing the very best we believe it is currently possibly to do; having a product that minimises the use of raw materials, that reduces energy consumption, that reduces Co2 output and that can be recycled afterwards, reducing the amount of waste that goes to landfill is a real step forwards.
More importantly it does all of this whilst still performing in terms of warmth, weight, compressibility and longevity and that highlights what remains our primary focus, to produce products that perform and that are built to last in the often demanding conditions we know our customers choose to use our products in.
Of course there remain real challenges to the development of products that have high ecological and sustainable values as well as transparent ethical standards. Studies have shown that even for brands who are considered to champion the environment and ethical standards of their manufacturer, price and quality remain the most important factors that affect their customers decision to buy. And so in order for these types of products to become mainstream requires joint action from suppliers, manufacturers and retailers to help minimise the additional costs to the consumer and for customers themselves to ask more questions of purely low price-driven or short product life-span consumerism.
At present we are simply trying to do the best job we think we can, when we can.
The Earthrise™ I & II sleeping bags will be available in stores from March 2010.
