What are some of the biggest moves that Boards & More has made in recent years towards becoming a more sustainable company?
From my view, we haven’t made any big moves yet, but we are starting and implementing all of the small initiatives that we can. Starting with CO2 compensation for all of our main products (Kites, Boards, Bars, Sails, SUPs), we redesigned all packing to use less material which is from postconsumer sources wherever possible, we are using recycled polyester for our bags and we are organizing and supporting beach clean ups.
How will these initiatives impact company actions and what will be the resulting effect or reduction in waste?
At the moment we compensate 6.342t of CO² per year. A car that goes around the entire globe once would emit approx. 7562kg. To emit 6.342 tons, that same car would circle the globe 838 times!
With our new packaging concept, we managed to save about 22 tons of paper and about 7 tons of plastic every year.
Further, with our last beach clean-up event, we cleaned up 27 beaches in 16 countries worldwide and collected about 800kg of trash. (Unfortunately, due to COVID-19 we had to postpone our summer 2020 clean up, however we will start this again as soon as it is safe to do so or more locally).
Another initiative is our cooperation with Waste2Wear who recycle postconsumer plastic bottles and produce high-end yarn. This yarn is then woven or knitted into fabrics that are used to produce our ION Core Boardbags, Duotone Sailbags and Duotone Kitebags.
In one Kitebag approx. 24 bottles are processed.
What is your impression of how the majority of employees at Boards & More feel about these policies and projects? Do they jump on board easily?
All B&M employees believe it´s a necessary and important direction. Often, we have discussions about what makes sense and what does not at this stage in our development and with the resources we have available. However, once we agree on what projects we are ready to implement, everyone at B&M jumps onboard quite readily. Sometimes it can take a little time to change people’s habits in terms of making the choices to minimize their personal footprint like by carpooling to work or by taking public transportation instead of driving a personal car, but we’ve already been seeing significant improvement in these areas as well.
