Quite a lot goes into assessing and offsetting a company's carbon footprint. But we believe that it is important to be transparent, share this story and set an example for other brands in the industry. So today, we will take you along for the ride.

Are you ready? Here we go.

Let's start at the beginning. CANO was founded with the idea to support artisans and preserve traditional craftsmanship. Our founders have always believed that ethics and sustainability go hand in hand. So from the very start, they already aimed to produce in a way that was kind to people and the planet.

As our brand grew, our environmental footprint did too. There is a lot that goes into your shoe before it arrives at your doorstep. Raw materials, material processing, shoe manufacturing, creating the packaging, transporting it to our warehouse in Germany, and then finally to you, the customer.

All the steps in our supply chain have an input and output, creating CO2 emissions as they go through their processes. Last year, we decided that we wanted to offset the emissions. But we had no idea how to correctly calculate this. Let alone, reliably show that you actually offset everything. That is why we decided to work together with the NGO Climate Neutral.

As CANO is a small brand, we could use the Brand Emissions Estimator (BEE) to estimate our carbon footprint. This is a tool developed by Climate Neutral estimates your company's carbon footprint based on your revenue and products by applying emission factors as identified in the Greenhouse Gas Protocol.

To make this estimation more accurate for CANO, we started gathering data about our company, production facilities and transportation partners.

Jessica, our project manager for the Climate Neutral process, asked everyone in the team to fill in a survey about their commute habits, and bugged everyone with specific questions about their department of the company. This included scope 1 (Direct Brand Emissions), scope 2 (Indirect Brand Emissions), and scope 3 (Supply Chain Emissions) in our supply chain, and consisted of things like:

• Utility bills, including gas and electric bills
• Fuel (gasoline, diesel, or propane) used directly in company cars etc.
• Purchase orders
• A list of capital equipment purchased
• Utility bills and fuel usage from contract manufacturers
• Shipping logs for upstream and downstream shipping
• Employee commuting data, including the number of employees and mode of transportation
• Business travel records

The BEE combined this company information with industry averages to estimate our carbon footprint for 2020, which was 77 tCO2e.

In the graph below, you can see how our estimation would be without the data we refined, compared to what it is using our actual company data.

Our biggest impact comes from manufacturing, followed by materials and shipping, as can be seen in the pie chart.

We then offset the 77 tCO2e by investing in climate change solutions. Our projects include forest conservation in Cambodia, clean cookstoves in Mali, renewable energy in China, and more sustainable initiatives from all over the world.

After that was confirmed, we were finally certified as a Climate Neutral brand!

But our work doesn't stop there. We must reduce our future emissions to limit climate change. So we have committed to reducing our carbon footprint with the implementation of clean energy at our headquarters and choosing lower impact shipping options in the coming 24 months.

Click here to learn more about our Sustainability Approach. If you have any specific questions about our Climate Neutral certification process or CANO's sustainability, you can reach out to us at contact@thecanoshoe.com.