We had heard that airfreighting is a bigger emitter of carbon than sea or road. But holy crap! We didn’t realise just how much. What our results show is that airfreight only makes up 24% of the total kilometres our product travelled, but it creates 90% of total emissions from freight. Total freight emissions are 309.685 tonnes, and air freight is 278.72 tonnes.

With the instability of supply due to COVID, climate change related weather conditions and Russia’s war on Ukraine, we had to use airfreight more than we really should to ensure we were getting our product in on time. To give you an idea, when we sea freight something, it usually takes 4 weeks to get to us, but since COVID it has taken up to 12 weeks. Planning for this uncertainty of supply is challenging. For example, we don’t want to bring in our heavy winter coats too early. But if they come too late, we will miss the sweet spot of when people are actually looking for a new coat.

However, we have now accepted the uncertainty around sea freight, and have worked hard to refine our design and purchasing processes to mitigate the effects on the business.

To do this we have increased our design and production teams so that we can work further ahead of time, and we have reworked our purchasing methods so that we can still operate successfully when product is delayed.

There will always be seasonal product that we need to be on time (think that cute lil summer party dress, or snuggly winter coats, or the 100% correct colour we all ADORE that simply must come in at just the right time), and so for now, we accept that airfreight is still something that we may have to use. However, it is a fallback rather than a standard.

We have set a target that we will sea freight 80% of our product going forward, and we plan to be there by October 2023.

For many years we have been working to reduce the waste we send to landfill, including; composting our food and organic waste, sending broken plastic hangers back to the manufacturer to be recycled, recycling in house, and collecting soft plastics. We actually thought we were doing pretty well. And EVEN THEN, our emissions from waste to landfill are 5.83% of our total emissions, or 20.95 tonnes.

You can refer to the Waste section of our Toolbox to see what we are doing in regards to our production and packaging waste. At RUBY HQ and in our IRL stores, we will take further steps, getting all of our team onboard to reduce our waste to landfill even further.

It’s important to highlight that these emission levels do not include emissions generated by sending waste from the manufacturing process to landfill. Currently, none of our CMT waste goes to landfill (see more in our Waste section of this Toolbox), but if it did (as is the standard practice in the industry), we believe that the emissions from waste would be significantly higher. This is why as an industry we need to work together to properly channel excess materials from production away from landfill, and into other products that are valuable.