Established in 1862, Mammut Sports Group is a Swiss outdoor company selling high-quality clothing and equipment to mountain sports enthusiasts worldwide. While its customers go about conquering some of the world’s toughest outdoor challenges, Mammut has spent the last twenty years actively tackling sustainability challenges head-on. Adrian Huber, Head of Corporate Responsibility at Mammut, chatted with Richard Hagan about how the company is conquering one sustainability peak after another.
Mammut Sports Group was founded over 160 years ago as a small family business, owned by Kaspar Tanner, a rope maker, in Dintikon, Switzerland
Initially making ropes for agricultural use, several decades later its product range shifted to ropes for mountaineering and sailing. A significant milestone for the company and alpine safety was achieved in the 1950s, when Mammut launched the first glacier rope made from nylon yarn.
Mammut’s evolution continues to the present day, with the small Swiss family business ultimately transforming into a leading worldwide specialist in ropes, harnesses, sleeping bags, clothing and footwear, as well as mountain and outdoor sports equipment.
Adventures across Europe
Mammut is a global company, employing 850 staff in eight countries. Additionally, it has distribution agreements in 40
countries, offering customers the world over a complete range of outdoor apparel, hardware and footwear.
It also owns 47 brand stores and outlet stores around the world, delivering an exciting in-store Mammut experience, designed to encourage alpine adventures.
To ensure that its products stay at the pinnacle of its customers’ needs, Mammut proudly maintains partnerships with various professional alpine athletes who evaluate Mammut’s materials and equipment on an ongoing basis. It has been a highly successful programme that is exemplified by Mammut’s Eiger Extreme collection.
First launched in 1995, the Eiger collection is designed for extreme adventures on Europe’s mountains, having been endorsed by high-profile alpinists including Stephan Siegrist and Nicolas Hojac, both of whom directly contributed to the collection’s design and engineering. The Eiger Extreme collection has since been augmented
by offshoots such as the Eiger Free collection, developed in collaboration with professional freeskier Jérémie Heitz, and the Sender Harness developed in partnership with renowned rock climber Adam Ondra.
A decade of sustainability
Mammut is incredibly proud of its sustainability programme that was initiated over a decade ago, beginning in the early 2010s. While the programme had been fruitful, the past several years have seen the intensity of its sustainability efforts substantially ramp up.
“Our industry is heavily driven by the sustainability mega-trend, but we have the benefit of having had a head start over a decade ago, and so we already have internal processes for sustainability,” said Adrian Huber, Head of Corporate Responsibility at Mammut. “The industry has now reached a tipping point at which sustainability is no longer a ‘nice-tohave’, but a real part of our daily task list. Sustainability is truly driving our strategies and products and is now the key innovation driver in our industry.”
Pointing to various incoming European Union regulations, Adrian Huber highlighted the high profile of sustainability programmes
in the clothing sector: “We have made various commitments, including the UNFCCC (the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, also known as the Paris Agreement), along with the UN Fashion Industry Charter for Climate Action and the Science-Based Targets Initiative. Therefore, the journey ahead is clear, and the things we need to do to decarbonise are fully outlined.”
A particular highlight of Mammut’s sustainability programmes is its Resourceful Performance initiative. Driven by the company’s Chief Product Officer, the Resourceful Performance programme aims to use as few resources as possible while producing the best-performing sporting solutions possible. The end result must enable Mammut’s consumers to engage in their activities without greater impact and without compromising the product’s longevity and quality.
Most crucially of all, the Resourceful Performance programme implements a new requirement that Mammut’s products must be repairable and be specifically designed to cater for endof-life solutions. “Keeping the product’s end-of-life in mind is an important step towards our circular economy goals,”
said Adrian Huber. “Whether end-of-life means repairing, recycling, disassembling or reselling, these are all hot topics related to the circular economy and ones that we are actively tackling.”
In 1992, Mammut began offering repair services within Switzerland and Europe, with repairs being carried out by its global network of local retail and third-party repair studios. In the service’s first year, Mammut’s teams mended an impressive 16,000 products. Last year, Mammut mended 14,815 products in Europe and was aware of 247 third-party repairs in North America, 330 in China, an estimated 930 in Japan, and 134 in Norway.
Bottling up the Himalayas
In addition to constantly striving to meet its growth objectives, Mammut has committed to reducing its carbon emissions
by 55% for 2030 or sooner, while aiming to be net zero by 2050 at the latest. Mammut is tackling this challenge on three simultaneous fronts: supplier energy, materials and circular economy.
On the materials front, Mammut is moving away from virgin polyesters and polyamides, to use recycled alternatives instead , but there is a catch. “This isn’t sufficient to meet the required 55 per cent carbon emissions reduction goal,” said Adrian Huber. “It means that we have to find alternative materials with significantly better environmental and carbon profiles than our existing solutions, and that involves innovation, development and research.”
The company is actively exploring alternative materials such as hemp, while trying to become more circular wherever possible. In Nepal, Mammut has teamed up with a local charity called Himalayan
Life. The Mountain Plastic project sees plastic bottles collected throughout the Himalayas and delivered to Kathmandu, where special machinery converts the bottles into PET pellets. Mammut is then able to use those pellets to make materials such as fibres and fleece.
Mammut’s climbing ropes, which contribute to 14% of its carbon footprint, are obviously a particular focus for the company’s sustainability efforts. “Our ropes are quite easy to recycle as they’re made from mono-material, and that’s what we’re now doing for our ropes and our materials sector in general,” said Adrian
Huber. “We are currently closing the loop in rope manufacturing.”
In conclusion, Adrian Huber reflected on Mammut’s sustainability programme and his own involvement in it: “I’ve been fighting for twenty years to make sustainability an integral part of how we do business. What excites me these days is that I no longer have to convince any investor or anyone else of the importance of sustainability. It’s become a real part of our company’s strategy, supported by our management and driven by our investors. Business as usual is no longer an option, and this makes me really optimistic.”
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I’VE BEEN FIGHTING FOR TWENTY YEARS TO MAKE SUSTAINABILITY AN INTEGRAL PART OF HOW WE DO BUSINESS.
