Our business grew from a simple product idea – a pencil that could become a plant. By encouraging our customers to plant their pencils after use, we give our products a new purpose and a second life. Sustainability and doing the right thing have been an instinctive, natural direction for SproutWorld since our early start-up days. As we’ve grown, this has developed into a clear strategy for both our products and our company – and we’re still learning and getting better.

From the start, we knew we wanted to make a profit guided by our principles. Our main focus was on building close relationships with our production sites, developing quality products for our customers, and documenting our actions through third-party certifications. These principles have now been cemented through our B Corp membership, where profit and purpose are interdependent and given equal importance. We continually focus on doing better in documenting our sustainability efforts with our stakeholders.

Our European production of plantable pencils is a good example of how we think circular. Most of the wood from our pencils is sustainably harvested in Poland. Every time a tree is harvested, another one is planted. We have also invested in the Forest Carbon Farms project in association with the Polish State Forest. This is an afforestation program that not only replants trees in the area where our raw materials come from, but also broadens the biodiversity within those forests.

To move forward on climate action, we’ve taken the findings from our first climate accounting report in 2022 and from our product Life Cycle Assessments (LCA), and have identified the areas where we as a company need to make changes to reduce our CO2eq footprint.

We have signed up to the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) that commits us to setting emissions reduction targets in line with limiting global warming to 1.5ºC and a net-zero future. To achieve this, we have set ourselves some ambitious near- and long-term goals. We have summarized these goals in our SproutWorld climate pledge.

Our target is to reduce our CO2eq emissions. These are the 3 focus areas we'll be working on:

1. Increase the use of renewable energy in our European production from 50% to 70% by improving our energy mix. Today our production runs on 50% renewable energy in the form of solar panels. In the future, we'll be adding more solar panels.

2. Change to more energy-efficient equipment in our European production by replacing equipment with up-to-date and more energy-efficient versions.

3. Procure 100% green energy for our Copenhagen HQ.

Our net-zero goal is to reduce our CO2eq footprint by 95% by 2040, without the use of carbon credits. As we move forward with our goals, we will refine our strategy, efforts, and resources to ensure we stay on track. We’ll do this through continuous learning, innovation, and management of our products’ life cycle.

As we continue to find ways to reduce CO2eq emissions from our production processes, we are also looking at minimizing our packaging waste, with a longer-term goal of being completely packaging free.