About one-quarter of all greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are attributable to worldwide agricultural and forestry practices. That means three-quarters are attributable to other causes, and one of them is probably connected to your business in some way. After all, nearly all businesses use electricity and heat (responsible for another one-quarter of all GHG emissions), and many industries produce their own electricity and heat on-site through the burning of fossil fuels (industry contributes 21% of total GHG emissions). Even the smallest employers are probably contributing global climate change arising from building occupancy (6% of global GHG emissions) and transportation (14%).
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So, do you just need to buy a forest somewhere to offset your carbon production? Or could you build a better business by working sustainability into your supply chain as part of your product development strategy?
That’s exactly what one company has done—you might say, they’ve put on their thinking caps and figured out how to directly incorporate carbon farming into their product line.
The Great Outdoors as a Business Model
North Face is known for their high-quality outdoor gear—and since selling outdoor gear means encouraging people to go outdoors, it also has a long history of involvement in sustainability and corporate social responsibility. After all, how will you sell cold-weather hiking gear if there’s no place left to hike?
But even North Face has largely focused its carbon reduction programs on being “less bad,” as Senior Sustainability Manager James Rogers has phrased it—trying to reduce a company’s impact on the environment. In its latest initiative, North Face has done such efforts one better, actively trying to be “more good” by creating a product whose creation improves the environment.
North Face partnered with Fibershed, a nonprofit organization that develops sustainable regional models for textile production, to purchase wool from Bare Ranch in Eagleville, California. The ranch raises its sheep using carbon farming practices that result in a net reduction of atmospheric carbon, like improved pasture management and rotation practices, increased biodiversity on the ranch, and protected riparian areas on the ranch. Once its strategies are fully implemented, Bare Ranch believes it could offset 6 to 10 times the GHG emissions that result from the production of its wool each year. That’s about 4,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide each year—approximately equivalent to the GHG emissions of 850 passenger vehicles.
Wool from Bare Ranch is used by North Face to produce its “Cali wool” beanie—making sustainable, carbon-sequestering agricultural practices an essential part of the product line. Manufacturers that use any agricultural products—plant or animal food, fiber, or fuel products—in their own product could, potentially, do something similar. Where in your supply chain is there potential to encourage and directly incorporate environmentally sustainable carbon-farming practices?