Environmental sustainability and the eye care industry
Ann Blackmore, a policy and regulatory consultant who has worked for over nine years in the optical sector, considers what concerns around environmental sustainability could mean for the eye care industry and outlines some of the drivers for change.
Product carbon footprint, circularity and 3D print on Ace & Tate sustainability agenda
Dutch-based eyewear brand Ace & Tate will launch its first 3D-printed collection with a short range of sports glasses, we learned in an interview with Femme van Gils, sustainability manager, and Sean Peron, vice president of marketing and brand. The collection will be based on Arkema’s Polyamide 11, a polymer ...
National Vision releases sustainability report
National Vision, the third largest optical retailer in the U.S., has just released its 2021 sustainability report, called “A World Worth Seeing”. The full report, which presents the group’s activities and progress in four different CSR areas (social, employees, environment and governance), can be downloaded on the company’s website. We ...
Mykita fully switches to sustainable acetate
MYKITA and Eastman have jointly announced that the independent eyewear company would exclusively source the U.S. specialty chemical company’s Acetate Renew for all its acetate material needs, as of last March 30. While several other eyewear brands have joined Eastman’s Acetate Renew’s program in the last months, the Berlin-based eyewear ...
Warby Parker and Eastman find a circle for demo-lens plastic
In a partnership with Eastman, Warby Parker has established a recycling program for the recycling of demo lenses.
Eastman’s new French plastics recycling project will apply to eyewear, too
French President Emmanuel Macron and Mark Costa, Eastman Chemical Company’s board chairman and CEO, jointly announced last month that the U.S.-based specialty materials company plans to invest up to $1 billion in a material-to-material molecular recycling facility in France that would become operational by 2025. The facility would use Eastman’s ...
Carbon-neutral Icare Group gets EcoVadis silver
Icare Group, the OEM eyewear supplier, announced a few weeks ago that it had received a silver rating from EcoVadis, one of the global leading platforms in environmental and ethical certifications for global supply chains. The company said that, with this new CSR achievement, it ranked in the top 25 ...
Kering Eyewear banks on blockchain for supply chain sustainability
Kering Eyewear is launching a blockchain-based sustainable initiative in order to measure the overall impact of its finished products through a collaborative platform involving the suppliers at all levels of its entire value chain. Called V.I.R.T.U.S., an acronym standing for Verified, Integrated, Reliable, Trustworthy and Secure, is being described by ...
bbase launches sustainable materials’ index
The bbase Design Group, an eyewear designer and manufacturer based in Hong Kong, has released a comparative tool measuring the sustainability performance of a number of materials used for the production of frames and lenses with the announced objective of providing the industry with a comparative analysis of existing sustainable ...
Sustainability: the demo lens challenge (part 2)
While the eyewear industry’s sustainability efforts have mostly focused on the use of eco-friendly or recycled material for the frames so far, the disposal of demo lenses, which end up in landfills for the most part, remains one of the sector’s main issues and still largely untackled because of its ...
