As of this year, the corporate wear provider Hakro has not only been climate-neutral at its headquarters in Schrozberg, Baden-Württemberg, but also the collection for the first time. According to Hakro, this means that it is the first provider in this segment to have extended climate neutrality to the product as well.
Hakro has been committed to sustainability and environmental protection for many years. The company has been climate-neutral at its headquarters since 2017, thanks in part to its self-sufficiency with green electricity, an extensive energy management system with battery storage, a combined heat and power unit and a gradual switch to a vehicle fleet that does not use combustion engines.
Now the entire collection has also been made climate neutral. To do this, Hakro first recorded the CO2 footprint of its products in the entire supply chain, taking into account the emissions of all processes: raw materials, transport, manufacture, packaging, recycling and recovery that occur at the end of a product’s life cycle. This approach is called “Cradle-to-Customer plus Waste” and was implemented together with ClimatePartner, with whom Hakro has been working since 2017.
ClimatePartner calculated projections of their CO2 emissions for all Hakro products. Hakro compensates for the emissions that are still unavoidable at the moment by investing in forest protection in Brazil, and the CO2 balance shows potential for further savings. Previous avoidance and reduction approaches include, among other things, the gradual conversion to sustainable or recycled fibers, the abandonment of packaging material or its reduction, the increased use of renewable energies in the supply chain and, in a pilot project, the use of sustainable biofuels for the transport of goods by sea.
“This process is far from over for us,” says Jochen Schmidt, Head of Quality, Values & Sustainability at Hakro. “For us, avoidance and reduction always take precedence over compensation – and at the same time compensation is a necessary intermediate step on the long way there. Because our textile supply chains are complex and the implementation of reduction measures takes time. ”
With an even more precise recording of primary data, Hakro wants to localize even more emission hot spots in the future and reduce them through direct interventions.