Environmental Commitment

A healthy planet is essential for our sport, our animals and our wellbeing.

Charles Owen is committed to minimising the impact of its activities on the environment, and improving it wherever possible.

We proudly manufacture our products in Wrexham, North Wales. Soon after our new environment-centric facility was built, in 2003 we won the Welsh Civic Trust award for our efforts to support and improve the local environment.

As a holder of the Royal Warrant, we are regularly audited as a company to ensure we are meeting or exceeding a wide range of sustainability, environmental and ethical standards.

Certification

When it comes to making claims and messaging around sustainability, we believe all companies have a responsibility to be totally transparent and accountable.

Charles Owen is a member of Planet Mark, an internationally recognised sustainability certification. Through the process of being certified, Planet Mark help us to measure our carbon footprint and make continuous improvements to reduce it.

Achieving Planet Mark certification involves monitoring everything we do, from water and electricity usage to waste, recycling and fuel consumption.

Our first full reporting year was July 2020 – July 2021. This is used as our benchmark looking forward to improve upon.

View our Certification and results, including total carbon footprint.

To maintain the certification members must meet their minimum reduction targets each year.

With Planet Mark we are also protecting endangered rainforests by halting deforestation in Peru and supporting the Eden Project.

We look forward to sharing our sustainability goals and achievements as we work towards Net Zero.

Eco-committee

Aside from our work with Planet Mark, an internal committee meets on a quarterly basis to review our practices to ensure the business is meeting its environmental targets and goals as set by the company directors.

The key points of its strategy aim to minimise waste by evaluating operations and ensuring they are as efficient as possible, minimising greenhouse gas emissions and actively promoting recycling both internally and amongst our customers and suppliers.

We also plan how we can minimise the environmental impact of both production and distribution, and meet or exceed all environmental legislation.

Current practice

• Making our products in Britain minimises delivery miles to our core markets
• Raw materials are sourced as locally as possible, from carefully vetted and responsible suppliers
• Rainwater harvesting from the factory roof, used for production processes
• Invest in our own specially-tuned polystyrene (EPS) machine, cooled using rainwater
• Carefully measure our water waste and reuse as much as possible
• Eco-friendly LED lighting throughout our facility
• Highly efficient heating system which re-circulates heat from machinery to provide heating to other areas of our building
• Re-use cardboard waste for packaging
• Website runs off sustainable energy and is optimised for speed and performance
• Cycle-to-work scheme offered to all employees
• Wild meadow supports insects and local wildlife
• Discontinued fabrics used to make blankets for local homeless charities and provided to schools for craft lessons
• Information provided to everyone in the company to encourage and support them to support their environment at work and home
• Charles Owen is proud to partner with Ecologi to fund forest restoration projects . We plant over 800 trees a year with at least 10% within the UK.

2022 environmental goals

• Working with Planet Mark to properly measure and reduce our carbon footprint
• Trailing a new scheme to test reusing shipping boxes from our component deliveries for outgoing shipments
• By Spring 2022 50% of the power used to make our riding helmets to be powered by renewable sources from our energy supplier and new solar panels on our factory roof
• Replace more hand towel stations with eco-friendly hand dryers
• Significantly reduce our use of airfreight to transport goods
• Introduce new recycling stations for harder-to recycle manufacturing items such as earplugs and goggles
• Extending our eco-initiatives to cover our warehouse facilities in America
• Further reducing our petrol car fleet by 50%
• Switching to more eco-friendly cleaning products for our buildings

2022 key achievements

• 3.6% reduction in electricity usage
• 47% reduction in fleet diesel fuel purchased
• Reduction in waste and zero waste to landfill
• Installed 2 new electric charging points in our car park encouraging staff and visitors to drive electric cars
• Ran ‘Green November’, with a tree planted for every helmet sold.

2021 key achievements

• All our products now leave our factory in sustainably sourced, recyclable packaging
• Our shipping boxes, strapping and tape are also now recyclable and plastic-free
• Launched new certification with Planet Mark so our carbon footprint is measured independently to ensure we are meeting our carbon footprint target
• We installed 5x more tablets into our factory to replace paper
• More internal meetings conducted over zoom to lower travel emissions from flights/road travel
• Installed more recycling stations throughout the factory
• Introduction of FSC printer paper throughout our factory and offices
• All lighting throughout our factory and offices is now motion-activated, using LED low energy bulbs
• Our old technology and computers are being re-used by a local college for training.

2020 key achievements

• Reduced our waste-to-landfill by 50% vs. 2019
• Reduced our fibreglass waste by 20% vs. 2019
• Appointed a Charles Owen eco-committee, an internal team responsible for driving the business to meet environmental targets and reviewing business practices
• Installed a new digital system throughout our offices and factory to replace a paper system.

For more information about how we strive to protect and improve our environment, please get in touch.