Use our Sustainability Auditing Tool!

Last year, Aarn Packs fan, Chelle Brouwer, approached us about doing a sustainability audit on Aarn Packs as part of a Bachelor's Dissertation project for her degree in Sustainability and Outdoor Education.

Chelle loves great gear that keeps us safe, and seeks to protect te taiao, our environment. This passion had a huge impact on why she chose a sustainability audit as her research idea and topic. 

Now that her degree is completed, we can share with you a special project we have worked on together as part of her research project fulfilment: our very own sustainability auditing tool.  

Firstly, Why create a sustainability auditing tool? Aren’t there plenty of other tools out there already? Great question – and one we set out to answer at the very beginning of this project. Literally every tool we found, short of the Sustainable Business Network’s Sustainability self-assessment (n.d.), cost money or demanded that the business they were auditing was making a certain level of profit – and the bar was set really high.  

There are a few reasons for this, one big one being more profit = more leverage at every level. Generally bigger businesses can demand more from their service suppliers – manufacturers, sea freighters, wholesalers and retailers, and couriers. Don’t want to play ball? These businesses can afford to take their business away from a smaller player in their chain. Small businesses simply cannot do that, so leveraging more sustainable behavior is much harder, and therefore measuring sustainability is in itself a much more challenging process.  

Along the way, we figured out that small businesses are often pretty complex and unique in their operations, and a one-size-fits-all, quantifying approach to sustainability auditing was never going to work for Aarn Packs or any other small business. Equally, quantifying sustainability overlooks the depth of our indigenous businesses, who deal not only in money but also largely in aspects such as sense and experience, that are difficult to break down into figures.  

That’s where our tool sought to do something different, by identifying what we were doing well, challenging us to find creative solutions in areas where we weren’t doing so well, and giving us an opportunity to explain what worked and what did not work for a small business.  

We dubbed it the “Report & Rate” tool, encouraging businesses to ask themselves the questions – the “report” part, and then rate their performance. We rated Aarn Packs out of 10. However, in another role, when surveying tertiary students about aspects of the university events, Chelle uses the scale of “Missed the Mark”, “Just Okay”, “Pretty Cool” and “Nailed It” – the point being, that it’s best to choose a rating scale that works for the business and for clear, relevant output to their customer base! 

So, there you have it folks – Not a super complex process, but it’s intended to be simple for a business to get it done and out to their customers clearly and easily! As for why we are releasing it – We always said we wanted to create a tool that was available to other small businesses without creating yet another barrier to sustainability reporting. Our small businesses are at the grassroots of sustainable community-level actions – they have amazing support around them and their actions can drive real change. Supporting businesses as they start up and gain traction, to make sustainable choices, will help us all make better choices – especially in the gear that gets us outdoors safely to enjoy what we’ve got to protect!  

Here are 5 things we recognised that we needed to from our own sustainability audit:

1. Work with freight suppliers who actively work in reducing or offsetting emissions. This is pretty self-explanatory, our goal is to keep using and always looking for the most environmentally friendly way to get out products to us, to our dealers and to our customers.   
2. Release our trail maintenance kit - this is not something that is happening ASAP, but we are working to get this created and released. This helps with our 'cradle to cradle' goal and keeping packs out of landfill by prolonging life through repairing and not replacing packs.
3. Find ways to contribute to environmental efforts (through our commitment with 1% For The Planet) in other places like Vietnam (where our packs are made) and places around the world where our packs retail. 
4. Continue to monitor the factory (where Aarn Packs are made) on visits and report if there is any distress in the workers. We're lucky that our factory in Vietnam is really awesome, but we will always keep an eye open to make sure the incredible people that make our packs are treated well.  
5. Ensure continued support of key staff professional development around cultural and language practices consistent with our main operations. As Dan is the main person who heads to Vietnam, he is learning Vietnamese and about Vietnam to increase his, and in turn our, understanding of the country and how things work as a whole.

These are just five of the many things we are going to and want to implement over time, and we will assess and reevaluate as time goes on to make sure that we are on track or if we need to alter this list in any way. 

Please use this tool! And let us know how it works for you and your small business. 

This blog was written by Chelle Brouwer, who now has her degree in Sustainability and Outdoor Education and co-created this Sustainability Auditing tool with us here at Aarn Packs as part of one of her research assignments.