What Matters and Why

Our Goals:

• Reduce our waste and harmful substances.
• Reduce our carbon footprint, and energy and water use.

We make and sell gear and clothing for all kinds of people-powered activities, including cycling, hiking, camping, running, climbing, snowsports, and watersports. In 2011, we sold over 11 million individual products. We know that products represent MEC's biggest environmental impact. Our goal is to lessen that impact as much as possible.

For some of our goal areas (e.g. waste, harmful substances and climate), we've developed organization-wide programming. We've yet to benchmark and take a comprehensive approach to water, while we recognize this as a leading issue for humanity and business, today and in the future.

How We Do It

Our Product Design Charter highlights our principles of design and product integrity at MEC:

1. Quality – Products of the highest quality
2. Function, Form, and Fit – Products that function well for their intended use, are classic and appealing in form/design, fit the intended function, and look good
3. Value – Products that deliver outstanding value
4. Social Responsibility – Products sourced with consideration for the well-being of the people making them
5. Footprint – Products developed with an effort to lower their environmental footprint

All of these elements are embedded in our approach to product. From an environmental perspective, we take a lifecycle approach.

Product Life Cycle at a Glance

Our efforts start at the design table and move upstream. Each stage of a product's life cycle has an environmental impact: raw material feedstock, processing, manufacturing and assembly, packaging, distribution, use, and end of life. At each of these stages, we aim to consider energy and GHG emissions, water, waste, and chemistry/toxins, as well as land-use intensity and biodiversity. We are at the earliest stages of figuring out how to do this, and working collaboratively with industry on this project.

Painting a true picture of a product's footprint is, well, complicated. Consider the simplest of supply chains – a cotton T-shirt. Imagine tracking all the steps: the farming of cotton, ginning to separate it, spinning to make yarn, dying to colour it, knitting to make cloth. Then it goes to cutting and sewing at a factory before the T-shirt gets shipped to our stores. That's six touchpoints. Then consider the lifecycle of inputs, such as dyes, machines, and fertilizers. Now imagine a product like a pack, where the supply chain consists of hundreds of touchpoints for different materials, buckles, and zippers. A worthy challenge!

Our Environmental Impact

To reduce our environmental impact, we currently focus primarily on MEC-brand products, particularly textiles, and will expand to other areas as our influence and experience grows. We believe we're succeeding when we:

• Increase longevity: gear has to perform and last for many years
• Substitute harmful chemicals and materials with more benign alternatives
• Use more efficient, closed-loop processes and fewer resources to make products
• Close the loop to recycle end-of -life products and materials into another high-value use