Reducing and avoiding carbon emissions and minimising Specsavers’ environmental impact requires us to reshape and rethink everything we do, from how we power our stores and support offices, to how we design, manufacture and deliver our products and services to our customers and patients.
We know this is not going to be a straightforward journey and we know that we cannot achieve this alone. With this in mind, we focused the development of our sustainability strategy on having clarity in our purpose and creating a strategy that delivers action across our key environmental impact areas.
Our carbon emissions
In early 2024, we officially received validation of our science-based targets with the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), joining companies worldwide in following the science to reduce carbon.
Our targets set the ambition to achieve net zero carbon emissions across our global operations and supply chain by 2050 with an interim goal to reduce carbon emissions in our direct operations by 50% and in our supply chain by 25%, both by 2030.
A detailed analysis of our greenhouse gas emissions, carried out when setting our FY2021 baseline, showed 98% of our carbon footprint lies in our Scope 3 emissions (our supply chain: from materials, packaging and transportation) and 2% in our own operations (stores, support offices and manufacturing and distribution sites).
Knowing where our emissions sit within our full value chain has enabled us to develop specific decarbonisation roadmaps across our operational geographies. These have been developed in partnership with external specialists and our own internal carbon and water lead. Our next phase is putting these into action.
Our Packaging
Packaging plays an important role in protecting our products from damage and making sure they can be transported easily, helping us get our products to our stores and our customers safely. While packaging is important, we know that it can be damaging to the environment.
Our goal is to remove all unnecessary packaging from the business, redesign our packaging for circularity, and to only source our materials from sustainable sources. Our focus for packaging over the coming year will be on plastic reduction and we already have a number of projects under way; for example, the removal of shrink wrap on our contact lenses distribution boxes in Australia.
Where packaging cannot be removed, we will make it lightweight and manufacture using recycled materials. Using waste plastic to generate our packaging saves waste from landfill, reduces the amount of plastic in circulation and means we do not have to generate any new plastic.
Our Materials
The materials our frames, lenses, audiology and other products are made from forms a key part of our strategy to reduce our carbon emissions and also to minimise much wider environmental and social impacts associated with their production and manufacturing.
We have started on our materials journey, initially focusing on reducing the amount of unsustainable material being used in our products, while maintaining their integrity and quality.
Over the next year, we will be launching our materials sourcing guide, and also undertaking work with our supply chain partners to understand the full environmental impacts of our products across all life stages through a life cycle analysis, which will give us a data benchmark to measure progress against.
We know we have a lot of work ahead of us, and these are just a few of the key impact areas where we need to take action. Our strategy will continue to evolve along with metrics and governance that will measure and guide our progress.
We look forward to sharing more insight over the coming months from colleagues within our team and wider business about how we are navigating our roadmap towards our net zero target.
- Clare McMahon is head of environmental delivery at Specsavers.