MORE BALANCE, MORE CIRCULARITY

Giolio, as Product and CSR Manager at Aku, were there any discussions at the think tank you could bring “back to work?” Cooperation! The idea to leave our backyard and work with competitors. It can both be effective and lead to important results. This didn’t happen directly after we were there, but gradually it has grown. In many ways thanks to the initiatives from the European Outdoor Group. Now we are even starting to cooperate with competing footwear brands.

A lesson from the last years is maybe that change cannot always can be predicted? Absolutely. We used to talk about how to get people into the outdoors. But during the pandemic, huge amounts of people discovered by themselves nature as a way to find more life quality.

If you could do the same thing again – what would you like to bring into this discussion? The circularity of our products. I mean specifically mountain boots. It is a complex product in terms of raw materials and difficult to be separated and would need very specific waste management facilities. We can accomplish real circularity only with big investments, decided at the government level. So the discussion would be: What can we do more to influence these decisions?

Karla, what are you working with nowadays? Hundred percent working on developing circular systems and business models. Specifically for turning spent textiles – waste – into new mainstream raw materials through our nonprofit Accelerating Circularity.

Is it some discussion at Monviso that you particularly remember in retrospect?

One main memory is the conversations about that CEO’s needed to be convinced that sustainability was the way to go. My position was that if the CEO’s didn’t see sustainability as a key driver for their businesses they were lost, and therefore one should work with those who already understood.

One mission in Monviso was to envision the change that was needed. Today, what do you consider visionary, for the outdoor industry? This would be somewhat different, as things we didn’t see happening then are obvious now. The need to use used textiles as a raw material was a vision, today it’s a reality. The industry keeps trying to use linear business models with “circular” materials. Today, raw materials, labor and the environment are not properly considered in the supply chain.

Moving to circularity doesn’t make sense if we avoid addressing problems in these segments.