In the spirit of this ethos, the Ultimate Surfing Company has taken the crucial first steps towards reducing and offsetting our emissions. Rip Curl has completed a carbon emissions footprint project to cover our global operational regions, including Australia, New Zealand, USA, Europe, Japan, Brazil, Indonesia, and our wetsuit manufacturing in Thailand. The vast amount of data was collected for FY20 to create our base year, as well as FY21. This is something we’ve resolved to do annually to help gauge our progress towards a more sustainable future.
The scope of the project verged on boundless, covering emissions created through staff travel, electricity used in offices, stores and warehouses, freight movements broken down by air, sea and road, waste generated from offices and warehouse operations, LPG usage and refrigerants liabilities from air conditioning units. We also tracked our on-site renewables generated through our solar projects at head office, our warehouse, and stores. We understand our impact reaches even further than this, into our supply chain and post customer waste, but we needed to start somewhere, and this is our first step.
The projects consisted of gathering all raw data from all regions, compiling the data into different units of measure, then working with Toitu Envirocare, our nominated partner, to calculate, audit and verify the emission findings to give us an overall emission total.