At Spenco, we are 100% committed to exceeding your expectations as you find solutions for your health and footcare needs. Today, over 50 years later, Spenco is part of Implus, a dynamic company that focuses on active lifestyle accessories for both footcare and fitness.
Spenco believes that building superior products means building ethical and sustainable products. This means getting smarter and more resourceful in how we ideate, design, produce and bring products to our customers. We have demonstrated that strategies to design products that are both Fit for the Planet and are inclusive to more people are both commercially advantageous and can be more sustainable for people and planet, and we believe we can create a resilient and vibrant business that truly offers competitive, sustainable value to our consumer and for our business.
We have significantly advanced our climate strategy, materials management, and human rights due diligence through establishing new best practices and processes, enabling and hiring key staff, and building the institutional muscle to support these programs and goals. For more on these strategies across Spenco partner brands, please see Implus.com/Impact page for more information about Implus corporate climate goals and people engagement including Diversity, Education, & Inclusion (DEI).
We made a commitment to measure our brand level carbon footprint and have begun work to reduce our impact by brand and product line. Our primary goal is to directly reduce our emissions by being smart about our packaging material and product design choices, while supporting our suppliers to make their manufacturing operations more energy efficient and optimizing the transportation of product from their factories to our distribution centers and ultimately consumers. Where our improvements in efficiency and sourcing are not enough, we will pursue opportunities to offset the carbon it takes to make and deliver our products. For more on these strategies across Spenco partner brands, please see Implus.com/Impact for more information about Implus corporate climate goals.
UNLOCK GROWTH THROUGH EFFICIENCY & WASTE REDUCTION
In the last year, we have focused our initial efforts to reduce packaging waste on specific groups of products which we estimate will prevent 360 tons of plastic, paper, and other packaging waste. These early successes are very encouraging and have energized the team.
In 2023, we initiated conversations with our suppliers to look for more recyclable materials, to determine how to remove non-recyclable raw materials and to third party verify the recyclability of our products. As a member of How2Recycle, we have verified the labeling of our Spenco products to ensure we are correctly saying what is and is not recyclable. We will continue to engage our suppliers to look for ways to improve our packaging for full recyclability.
We will be taking on a number of key Spenco product packaging so please stay tuned to see these improvements.
INNOVATING FOR OUR FUTURE
Innovation is key to our Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) commitment. Whether designing a new product for the first time to use less material or rethinking an existing product to make it more repairable, our product developers are focused on exceeding consumer expectations and delivering our ESG goals. Through this collaborative process, we are pushing our own boundaries, building new skills across our teams and supply chain partners, and taking steps each day towards meeting our sustainability goals.
Spenco products have an established history of offering solutions for your health and footcare needs and we are trying to do the same for our ESG goals. As part of this, Implus has signed a contract with Terracycle to kick off collection of our insole products in 2024. Terracycle offers collection and recycling services for products that normally are not accepted through local government recycling activities. Through this contract, we are preparing to test options for using the collected materials for useful secondary good and investigate where we can bring that material back into our own insole brands to reduce our raw material sources. We are excited by this opportunity and will keep our customers informed of this progress.
This is only the beginning to finding new opportunities for ensuring our products can support our customers’ goals and the value of the product. We continue to iterate to find the balance between hitting new innovative targets, finding the right price point for our customers, and achieving ESG goals.