Sustainability

Sustainable action at MENRAD

As a value-oriented family business, Menrad places great importance on sustainability, climate and environmental protection, in addition to uncompromising quality and outstanding design. Our striving for responsible action has led to the development and continuous implementation of a company climate strategy "Think Sustainably. Act Responsibly.".

From a realistic point of view, it is obviously utopian that environmental pollution can be avoided 100%. So what can we as a company and each individual do to further optimise our climate-friendly operations? At the end of last year, Menrad introduced a comprehensive action plan to improve the sustainability of the company and all its processes.

The actions are based on the 6 MENRAD Ps:

Partnerships

We select new partners on the basis of shared values and ambitions and give preference to partners who also care about sustainability and the environment. We also think about future (local) projects that we could support or participate in.

Products

The collections of selected brands are already predominantly made of recycled and/or biodegradable acetate or equipped with bio sun protection lenses. Titanium and stainless steel are used for all metal frames in the broad product portfolio.

Packaging

To protect the eyewear, we also emphasise recycled or biodegradable materials, including polybags. These efforts will be intensified next year by also switching cases, cleaning cloths and other packaging materials to sustainable materials and/or more sustainable production.

Point of Sale

Since 2022, we mainly use and produce POS materials made from recycled and/or FSC-certified components. To reduce our environmental impact, we are also increasingly using digital sales and communication channels.

Power

At our headquarters, we use green electricity and save over 50 tonnes of CO2 per year. In addition, the vehicle fleet was converted to lower-emission cars in 2022.

People

We encourage our employees to act sustainably and thoughtfully in their daily work. This not only refers to existing home office regulations and the way to work, but also, for example, business trips or the consumption of electricity and paper.

Our vision: climate neutrality

At the same time as taking measures in line with the 6Ps, we set ourselves the ambitious goal of climate neutrality. In order to be able to achieve this in a well-founded, measurable and comprehensible way, we decided on a certification procedure with the established agency and sustainability consultancy Fokus Zukunft, in which all aspects of corporate action as well as the employees are analysed.

The first step was to determine the CO2 footprint in detail: how much energy is consumed, what forms of transport do the employees use to get to the office, what is the impact of company fleet vehicles and business trips? From this, an average emission value per employee was calculated for the German locations and this was applied to the number of employees of the international sales companies in order to obtain the total CO2 footprint of Menrad Germany and its international sales subsidiaries.

The next step was to identify potential savings on the basis of the results report and to initiate appropriate reduction measures, such as converting to green electricity and a lower-emission vehicle fleet for the sales department.

By the investment in international climate protection certificates of high quality at the same time, we achieved to directly compensate the remaining, currently unavoidable emissions for the next two years (2022/23) and to set the company, including its international sales subsidiaries, climate-neutral.

The support provided by climate protection projects reaches precisely those countries that are already most affected by climate change and improves the local economic, social and ecological situation – in line with the 2030 Agenda. We selected projects in countries where we are active ourselves with our enterprises: These include a project in China that provides solar energy for the population, a project to generate renewable energy from biomass in China, the construction and operation of a hydropower plant to generate electricity in Turkey, and a forest conservation project to preserve the Brazilian rainforest.

Heqing Solar Cooker Project II, China

National Bio Energy Tongliao Biomass Power Plant, China

The Envira Amazonia Project A
Tropical Forest Conservation Project in Acre, Brazil

Uzundere I 63.0 MW Hydroelectric Power Plant Project, Turkey

Further information about the agency Fokus Zukunft is available at www.fokus-zukunft.com/

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