Sustainability
At Novation, we recognise the climate emergency that we’re living through, and are taking steps to reduce our environmental footprint as much as possible. We’re committed to transparency, both on our progress and what our targets are.
We are aiming to have carbon neutral business operations in 2024, and carbon neutral products by 2030.
To read more about our approach to Environmental Sustainability, visit our PLC site. https://focusriteplc.com/environment
Our Approach
We believe the only way to make sure we’re doing the right thing is to look at our products in detail across the whole lifecycle, starting with production — then logistics, energy consumption, and end of life treatment.
It’s going to take time, but we’re aiming to map the lifecycle of every product, and it’s got to be detailed. We’re not taking shortcuts: we’re checking raw materials right down to the last component to understand the materials we use and categorising and cross-referencing against conversion factors to work out metrics such as equivalent carbon dioxide emissions. This same approach is applied to the rest of the lifecycle, even calculating the energy consumption of the lighting in the warehouse before a unit is sold.
This work has been extremely valuable at showing the environmental hot spots but is has also highlighted the variety of use cases, and how emissions can vary dramatically between them.
Our work so far shows one major hotspot that we need to prioritise with all Novation products: the materials we use. There are many factors are outside our control such as the availability of alternatives, but we are tackling what we can for now and will be ready when technology catches up.
Upfront Raw Materials
At the highest level, there are only three major material categories in Novation products: metal, plastic, and electronics. Of these three categories, we can choose what metal and plastic goes into our products, but we rely on a few large suppliers for our electronics, so our influence here is limited. Here’s what we’re doing on these areas:
|
|
Metal |
Plastic |
Electronics |
|
Novation Usage Examples |
Chassis of Synthesizers |
Product Chassis, switch and knob caps |
All PCBs and components. |
|
Summary |
Metal requires high quantities of energy and resources to extract from the ground (and causes significant environmental damage in the process), but most metals we use are infinitely recyclable, so we’ve been actively looking for suppliers of recycled metal. |
Plastic production doesn’t produce the same levels of greenhouse gas emissions as metal, but it relies on fossil fuels as the raw material. We are looking into recycled and bio- based plastic options that retain the structural rigidity that we need, as recycled plastic usually ends up degraded through each recycling loop. |
Electronics are where we have the least control, but we can still reduce the amount of electronics to the minimum that achieves the target performance. We can also ensure that the products can be easily disassembled at the end of life so the valuable elements can be recovered. We also follow up with our suppliers regularly, checking on their progress to reduce their environmental impact through measures such as installing renewable energy and reducing resource consumption. |
|
Ability to Influence |
High |
Medium |
Low |
|
GHG Emissions Impact |
High |
Low |
Medium |
Our research shows that anywhere between 20-75% of a product’s total footprint is locked in with the materials we choose, so we’re exploring all opportunities to swap out materials for more sustainable options, starting with individual trial runs before scaling up to mass production volumes.
