reducing our impact on the planet
In our last article, we spoke about the impact we want to have on our community. Now it is time to talk about the impact we don’t want to have on our planet.
Since the early days of TOKAY, limiting and reducing our environmental impact has been a constant focus. Here is what we’re at on every aspect of the company: production, logistics, and operations.
Longer lasting cleats
TOKAY Flight’s junction between the sole and the upper is reinforced.
Improving the durability of our products has been our main product development focus since the release of the TOKAY Flight in 2019.
Ultimate is a very demanding sport. Our powerful cuts, executed at high speed, apply more pressure on the studs and the upper part of the cleats than most sports. We constantly use customer feedback and returns to improve our design and the materials we use.
In addition to improving the overall quality of TOKAY Flights, improving durability distributes the environmental impact of production and end-of life over a longer period of time.
Thinking the entire lifecycle.
Material selection is a critical part of product development.
Most of the environmental impact of a pair of cleats comes from production, and materials selection may be the most critical step in that process.
Although they can look the same, not all materials are equal regarding their environmental impact. Some of them require chemicals during production that pollute the air and water. When these products are discarded, those chemicals will be released in the air if burned or in the water if buried. When creating the TOKAY Flight, we carefully sorted the materials we used with their environmental impact in mind.
In 2019 we led an internal study to analyse better the impact of our products over their entire lifecycle. This study showed that avoid using PVC – a common material from the footwear industry – in our design reduced our impact on human health by 30% .
Our socks and beach socks are already produced in Europe. From our projections, producing our cleats in Europe would also be sustainable, although we’re still missing some key partners to make this project a reality. This change would have a positive impact on our carbon emissions.
The challenges we are facing today are more related to the end of life of our products. As we want our cleats to be light, materials must be glued together, making them hard to recycle. To our knowledge, there is no process able to recycle cleats. Creating our process would imply worldwide logistics that would have a high environmental impact.
If you have information about this, please shoot us an email!
Packaging
Plastic bags are used for just a few minutes and take 500 years to break down.
Plastics in packaging are not just the ones you see when you receive your product. Generally, products are wrapped together or individually into plastic bags to prevent them from being lost or damaged during transportation.
Thanks to our short supply chain, we limit the use of plastics to:
How to transform your cleats box into a disc holder.
- The film used to wrap our cartons together onto the pallets (approx. 10g/pair).
- The duct tape of the box (approx. 2g/pair).
Did you know you don’t have to throw your box away? Instead, you can reuse it as a disc holder!
Optimizing Logistics
Our supply chain is quite simple, the cleats ship from the factory to the warehouse and are then sent individually to the players.
In 2019 we opened a warehouse in the USA in addition to our European warehouse to optimise our supply chain. With most of our customers based either in North America or Europe, we can now limit shipping distances by shipping your pair from the closest warehouse.
Our warehouses are based in France and the USA.
To limit shipping back and forth, we have also implemented a few other actions, such as offering:
- Local return options in some cities,
- When a pair doesn’t fit, the possibility of finding a teammate interested instead of systematically shipping it back,
- Repair options when possible.
Grouping orders together is also an excellent way to decrease the impact of transportation, and it offers logistics discounts that we give back to the customer in our group order options:
A state of mind
Don’t worry, we’re very close to the post office.
When you care about your environment, taking care of it is a state of mind. Our day-to-day operations are by far the less impactful part of our activity, but still not a reason to neglect it.
We limit travels to their minimum, choosing train or car over plane when possible. We come biking to the office most days.
Furniture and equipment at the office are made of recycled materials or were bought secondhand. The computers are carefully maintained to last as long as possible.
