Sustainability

Environmental & Social Impacts

As we move through our landscapes—whether on a wooded path behind our house or on a remote trail surrounded by steep, rocky inclines—it becomes impossible to ignore the plurality of life that exists in the outdoors. Every step we take ripples through the ecosystem and though we come for the outdoors to change us, our impact is greater than we know.

An integral part of our sustainability mission is to understand our manufacturing practices in order to assess and lessen our environmental impacts because we understand that the Earth is a complex and fragile system.

In the knowledge that each of us must continue to refine what it means to steward the land, we have been diligently revising our mission and goals for taking care of the Earth in small ways that accrue over time. We are working to provide transparency about our worker and chemical safety, material use and design, and to better understand our impacts with practices of self-assessment and reporting in the knowledge that we still have work to do to reduce our environmental footprint.

The outdoors and its people bring us closer to what matters, and we are working to ensure our impacts create vibrancy rather than harm.

Animal Welfare

We source all of our wool from the American Sheep Industry Association (ASI), an organization that represents the interests of over 88,000 sheep farmers, to improve the American wool industry and maintain standards of the management of wool as a precious resource. The American Sheep Industry Association uses and distributes their Sheep Care Guide to help wool farmers and producers approach the responsible management of sheep husbandry, which is consistent with their quality assurance program. The Sheep Care Guide is an important reference for sheep farmers, reviewing many aspects of animal care, such as supplemental information on breeding, feeding, housing, predation, health, and management.

Packaging

In 2018, we reduced the average weight of our sock packaging by 21% and are using Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified paper in 91% of our line. FSC certified paper requires that the wood within our paper products comes directly from FSC-certified forests, recycled material, or controlled wood. This is an aspect of our manufacturing process which we aim to integrate in the coming years.

Textile Recycling

To ensure that our products and materials have an important role in our sustainability mission, we’ve chosen to dispose of our textile and sock waste in a way that lessens our impact on the environment. After socks are made, we recycle all textile waste from manufacturing with Martex Fiber, a textile recycler in the Carolinas. Martex Fiber turns our yarn scraps, defective socks, and worn-out, returned socks into reclaimed fibers and non-woven items, such as carpet backing and stuffing for various industrial uses.

End of Use

We believe in the quality of our socks, selecting yarns and creating products that will stay with us for years to come. With a primarily natural product, there is always a chance that a pair of socks may be damaged after long miles on the trail. To ensure the full lifecycle of our socks has a part to play in sustainability, every pair returned to us is recycled.

The Higg Index

A critical aspect to understanding and ultimately reducing our environmental impacts is using tools to measure our sustainability performance at annual checkpoints. Our parent company, Nester Hosiery, helped develop the Higg Index Facilities Environmental Module, and began implementing the self-assessment when it launched in 2012. The Higg Index works to provide brands, retailers, and manufacturers a way to accurately measure and score their company and products' sustainability performance, while also enabling a method of benchmarking our practices against other users. Importantly, this reporting method provides a more holistic overview, empowering us to improve our processes in meaningful ways to protect the well-being of factory workers, local communities, and the environment.

In 2016, Farm to Feet implemented the Brand & Retail Module of the Higg Index. The Brand & Retail Module helps us better understand how we can improve the environmental and social impacts of our company. Using this sustainability reporting tool that aims for transparency and goal-setting, we are able to better understand our environmental impacts and benchmark ourselves in the industry.