At LAUDE the Label, our commitment to Honoring Earth guides everything we do. From the moment we design your garments until the time they reach your door, we work to minimize our environmental impact.
Our garments use organic cotton to lessen the impact of pesticides, low-impact dyes to decrease water use during production, and natural fibers that require less energy to produce. We also avoid synthetic materials like polyester, which takes centuries to biodegrade, and upcycle our remnant fabric to make beautiful accessories while minimizing waste.
Still, we know we have room to grow. Even with our Earth-friendly moves, our manufacturing and shipping practices produce carbon emissions and impact the environment. To take our Honoring Earth commitment a step further in 2021, we partnered with Grow Ahead to balance the carbon emissions we cannot avoid as a business.
This year, we are most proud of achieving our commitment to carbon neutrality. Here’s what that means.
Women-led restoration project in Peru. Photo courtesy of Grow Ahead.
What is Carbon Neutrality?
Carbon neutrality is attained when a company offsets its carbon emissions by supporting a project that sequesters the equivalent amount of carbon. The practice has been criticized because some businesses pay for carbon offsets while continuing destructive practices and doing little work to reduce emissions. Many of the “offsets” sold by large carbon offsetting firms are created through activities like land grabbing and displacing Indigenous, rural, and forest communities. Because of this, many carbon offsetting organizations and businesses replicate the problems they are trying to solve.
To avoid that path, we first worked to consciously reduce our environmental impact at every step of our supply chain and process. Then, we partnered with a like-minded organization, Grow Ahead, to get a better understanding of our carbon footprint and a clearer path to carbon neutral.
Why We Partner with Grow Ahead
Grow Ahead provides a conscious path to carbon neutrality by supporting small-scale farmer organizations as they combat climate change in their communities. All Grow Ahead projects are planned, implemented, and maintained by local cooperatives and farmer associations. This gives communities more sovereignty over their food, resources, and ability to sustain their own lands.
Our Impact in 2021
Through our partnership with Grow Ahead, we invest in community-led and women-led agroforestry projects. Agroforestry is a system of planting trees, cash crops (like coffee and cocoa), and food together in a food-forest system to offset the effects of deforestation and provide more sustainable economic opportunities for farming communities. The full statistics of our impact in 2021 will be published in The 2021 Impact Report early February.
Our Next Steps
As we continue on our climate journey, we’re looking toward our production process to better understand how we can reduce our environmental impact. Because we do not own our manufacturing facilities, we don’t have a full picture of our current environmental impact. However, we work with manufacturing partners who are committed to reducing their own emissions by responsibly recycling or upcycling textile waste.
Looking forward, we’re committed to working with partners who use all organic or upcycled materials, certified low-impact dyes, natural fibers, and zero waste productions. When transporting raw materials, we will also rely on trucking whenever possible in order to avoid the high carbon emissions produced by plane travel.
Finally, we are working with our partners to complete full environmental audits of their facilities and we require that all partners be The Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS) certified by the end of 2022. Through this work, we aim to decrease emissions and waste while continuing to deliver on our commitment to Honoring Earth.
Women-led restoration project in Peru. Photo courtesy of Grow Ahead.