Ski manufacturer Renoun had a carbon emissions problem, and the first step to recovery was admitting it.

“We knew as a ski company we were having a lot of negative impact,” said Cyrus Schenck, founder of the Burlington, Vt., company. “Skis are terrible for the environment, and no one ever talks about it.”

Last fall, Schenck started Renoun on a journey to face up to the environmental footprint of the business and try to do something about it. The company made a public affirmation that “skis are bad, straight up,” and reached out to nonprofit Climate Neutral to discover what Renoun’s impact really looks like.

Climate Neutral helps companies broadly estimate their carbon footprint, then invest in offsets and develop a plan to reduce that footprint over time.

For Renoun, discovering ways to decarbonize after offsetting its footprint required creativity, Schenck said during the Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility (VBSR) annual conference last week. The ski manufacturing process, he said, does not have much room for innovative decarbonization because the products are highly designed and dependent on environmentally unfriendly materials.

“You really can’t make a green ski,” he said.

Vermont-based ski manufacturer Renoun says nobody talks about how bad skis are for the environment, and it is trying to change that. | Stowe Mountain Resort

The company had to turn to other areas of the business to achieve results. So far, it has identified sustainable opportunities, for example, in its packaging, shipping and product storage.

“Our skis right now are wrapped in plastic, so we’re looking at how to transition that to something a little more sustainable because it is single-use,” Schenck said.

Each pair of skis also is packaged with a box of promotional products, such as hats or t-shirts, but now the company is looking at that box through the lens of decarbonization.

“We are forced to question what we’re putting inside that box,” he said. “It may only cost a buck to put a hat in the box … but do we actually need to do that, or can we consolidate — finances aside — from a carbon perspective?”

The company also tailored its shipping containers to different ski sizes instead of having one box for all skis.

Having five different boxes is more complicated, Schenck said, but now the shipping costs and environmental impact of the boxes are down because the company is not shipping “a bunch of dead air.”

Finding a way to decarbonize product storage simply came down to locating a warehouse that uses renewable energy.

“This business is high-margin, so we don’t really care if things are a little bit more expensive for a warehouse,” Schenck said.

After working through the decarbonization process, Renoun can now display a Climate Neutral certified logo in its marketing. And the company is working to make its sustainability message relatable to its customers because the idea of offsetting a ton of carbon is not intuitive.

“We’re working hard to figure out how to relate how buying one pair of our skis offsets XYZ amount of carbon,” he said. “Maybe that’s equivalent to … one day of breathing or running a ski lift for 17 hours.”

The company is also “leaning in” to the reality of what its business and products mean in environmental terms.

“Our skis are still bad for the environment, absolutely,” Schenck said. “But the nice thing is that being carbon neutral in our case, we know we’re doing much, much better than anybody else out there, so it’s our way of showing the market and the industry that this is a financially viable option, moving forward.”

Demystify and Simplify

Climate Neutral launched about two years ago with a mission to give consumers an easy way to identify brands that are measuring and addressing their carbon emissions, according to CEO Austin Whitman.

The three-step brand certification process — measure, compensate and rethink — starts with an online carbon emission estimation tool designed to help businesses pass the first hurdle of decarbonization.

“We find that folks are really tripped up by the sense of complexity that exists around actually trying to measure carbon emissions,” Whitman said during the VBSR conference.

Making the estimation tool easy and accessible to brands allows them to go through the measurement process on their own and relatively quickly, without a big spend on analysis.

The software for the estimation tool is based on an economic input-output model, according to Isabella Todaro, certification manager at Climate Neutral. With a basic understanding of how sectors of the economy work, the estimator identifies a company’s emissions based on its operational and spending data.

In addition, a refinement option allows companies to override the model with more precise data, Todaro said. But even with those refinements, she added, the hotspots are not going to change.

The large drivers of a company’s carbon footprint are what Climate Neutral is going after with the estimator. It gives the company a place to start.

The Brand Emissions Estimator is available to the public at bee.climateneutral.org.