Our Sustainability Story

The world's first carbon neutral spa retailer

When you’re in the retail and manufacturing business and care about nature and the planet as we do – you can’t help but reflect on your role and how you can do things differently.

The truth is, you can’t do any type of manufacturing without creating a carbon footprint. But that’s no excuse to bury your head in the sand over climate change!

In early 2020 we committed to becoming a 100% carbon neutral company, joining the many other companies and industries taking a stand for the planet.

Six months later, we became the first carbon neutral spa retailer in the world!

For us, the catalyst for change was the devastating Australian bushfires. We’ve always been into reusing, recycling and reducing waste but the bushfires were a wake-up call.

We needed to act with urgency and we needed to show our own industry that carbon neutrality can, and must, be done.

Calculating our carbon footprint

To achieve our goal of carbon neutrality, we teamed up with Greenfleet™ – a leading not-for-profit environmental organisation and Australasia’s most established carbon offset provider.

With their help, and some extra support from Ekos in New Zealand, we carried out a comprehensive self-assessment of our carbon footprint.

Areas we assessed:

• All components used in manufacturing
• Our total manufacturing process
• All international freight
• Each retail showroom and warehouse
• Every domestic delivery
• Head office operations – including waste, electricity and vehicle use, flights and accommodation.

Offsetting our carbon footprint

Once we'd calculated the total emissions from almost all aspects of our business, we looked at the range of options available for offsetting those emissions – from tree planting to forest protection and more.

We settled on tree planting as our method of offsetting the carbon generated by our business. WIth Greenfleet’s help, we’ll be planting 10,000 trees every year!

Why Greenfleet™?

Greenfleet™ plants native biodiverse forests to offset carbon emissions on behalf of individuals and businesses and help fight the impacts of climate change.

We researched a number of carbon offset providers before deciding on Greenfleet.

We chose Greenfleet because:

• They are not-for-profit
• They are local (Australia/New Zealand)
• They have been operating for 20 years and have an impressive track record – planting over 9 million native trees across Australia and New Zealand, and removing over 3 million tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere! Learn more about Greenfleet’s carbon offsetting programme.

What is carbon offsetting?

Almost everything we do consumes energy and produces carbon emissions – like driving, heating homes and offices, and online shopping.

A carbon offset is a project or activity that reduces greenhouse gas emissions or sequesters (captures) carbon from the atmosphere to compensate for the emissions created by your own activities.

Carbon offsetting projects include investment in clean energy technologies, purchasing carbon credits from emissions trading schemes or planting of trees to soak up CO2 directly from the air.

Why carbon offsetting?

Aiming for zero-emissions wasn't a realistic goal for a manufacturing company like ours.

However, offsetting our emissions by buying carbon credits was something we could achieve in a relatively short time frame while making a difference to the planet.

What we don't measure

Whilst we are making every effort to offset our carbon output, there are some areas that we haven't taken into account yet, which other companies might.

These include:

• Rubbish disposal - but we do attempt to limit it
• Staff travel to and from their place of work
• Personal spa use by our customers

We don’t just offset, we reduce!

We believe that instead of looking simply at carbon offset, that in parallel, we should make every attempt to mitigate or limit our carbon contribution.

Here’s what else we’re doing to reduce our environmental impact:

• We have reduced air travel. COVID has taught us that this is possible. We have moved to video conferencing and cut our corporate air travel by over 30k air miles per year.
• Offsetting every flight we book. We now have a company policy to purchase carbon offsets through the airlines for every flight that we book.
• Switching to solar. We are progressively switching our manufacturing plant in China to rooftop solar and are looking at doing the same with our showrooms and our offices.
• We are going paperless. We are striving to become a paperless business across our administration and sales functions including the reduction of paper brochures
• Increasing use of recycled materials. We are specifying recycled plastics in the production of frames and cabinets for all Fisher^® and Vortex^® spa brands which will see all timber eliminated from the production of these brands by mid-2021.

Join us!

The more businesses on board with this the greater progress we'll make towards a truly sustainable planet.

If you or your company is interested in measuring and reducing your own carbon footprint, there are some great tools out there to help you.

As a start, simply Google ‘calculate your carbon footprint’ or check out the carbon footprint calculators on Ekos' website.

Thank you for your support

The feedback from our customers so far has been awesome and humbling.

Thank you for your encouragement and support. It hasn’t been easy, but you have made it easier.

Now, when you buy a spa or swim spa from Spa World, you can be confident you’re buying from a company that’s genuinely committed to action on climate change, and a better future for our planet.

This is only the beginning. If there are any areas you think we could do better please get in touch. We'd love to hear your thoughts.