Furch Guitars (Furch), one of the world’s leading manufacturers of premium-quality acoustic guitars, recently expanded its environmental activities by the use of green energy. Starting this year, all electricity is from fully renewable sources, which will reduce their total carbon footprint by up to 60% yearly.
Expanded, you say?
Well, similar to other acoustic instrument manufacturers (such as Taylor Guitars’ Ebony Project), Furch Guitars has partnered with a community in Panama to ensure environmentally sustainable harvesting of cocobolo and mahogany wood. You can read more about that here.
However, Furch Guitars’ CEO Petr Furch expresses his commitment to the sustainable production of acoustic instruments by pointing out that an approach to sustainability must be broader than the sourcing of materials. It must include the sourcing of green energy in it’s production process as well.
Our approach to green energy is rather unique, yet achievable for all companies. So far, most musical instrument manufacturers have focused mainly on material sources and have forgotten about energy sources. Therefore, I would like to motivate other companies to focus their attention in this direction as we have. The growing interest in green energy will make it possible to create a sufficiently large demand that will motivate energy producers to increase the production more steeply. In my opinion, this approach to reducing the global carbon footprint is healthier and at the same time sustainable in the long run, in contrast to the artificial principle of subsidies,
How Furch Guitars is Reducing Their Carbon Footprint
Most manufacturing companies try to keep their operating costs associated with electricity as low as possible. However, they often forget how such energy is obtained and that the cheapest energy is unfortunately not ecological and represents an increased burden on our planet.
As part of their environmental strategy, Furch seeks to combat this current paradigm and show a better way. While last year a quarter (25.1%) of all electricity supplied to Furch came from renewable sources, this year it is as much as 100%. Most of the green energy is solar, followed by biogas, water, wind and biomass.
In addition to a sustainable approach to obtaining green energy, its manufacturing will also significantly reduce its amount of CO2. Therefore, Furch expects that while maintaining the same level of electricity consumption, its carbon footprint will decrease by up to 83% yearly. When gas and automotive fuels are included, which are part of operating energy consumption, the total CO2 reduction should be around 60%.
As an example, the average carbon footprint created during production of one guitar will be reduced from the 35.3 kg to 14.1 kg of CO2 . These values vary due to the specific production processes used during the manufacture of each model.
The carbon footprint for each model is available on Furch’s website.
Leave a Reply