Other Sustainability Notes

East Fork is committed to addressing, ameliorating and perhaps even—in time—undoing the environmental harm caused by manufacturing our pottery, shipping our goods to customers and everything else we do in the process of operating our company. To that end, our plan is to be carbon neutral by 2025; beyond that, we’ll pursue carbon negativity. Obviously, this pursuit is beyond our in-house expertise, so we have chosen to work with Climate Neutral, a 501(c)(3) non-profit whose mission is to decrease global carbon emissions by creating a trusted net-zero certification for consumer brands. We have committed to measure, offset and reduce carbon emission. Climate Neutral will help us with every step of the process. We are on track to receive the designation Climate Neutral Certified, the standard earned by companies that offset and reduce all of their greenhouse gas emission, as determined by Climate Neutral. We feel excited and proud as we announce our commitment to addressing the environmental effects caused by our business, though these feelings are appropriately tempered by the work that lies ahead. In this space, we’d like to share the steps we’ve taken and those still to come in an effort to inform our customers and inspire other companies that are motivated to address environmental consequences but are perhaps unsure of the first steps to take. We’d also like to share where we are right now in the process, starting with what we see as our biggest challenge. East Fork fires large industrial gas kilns every single day. Indeed, right now there is no other way to transform clay to the durable pots that we sell. Not only that, as we bring our production to a new scale in 2021, we’ll have even more kilns in use. When we contemplate the environmental effects of our business, we realize that in our case, our reckoning will not be easily offset by practices we already have in place, things like using 100% recyclable shipping materials and offering professionally prepared lunches made on-site to minimize the number of people driving their cars to pick up food that likely will come in single-serving containers. In short, it’s imperative we do more. We set out to know exactly what it would take to make East Fork a carbon neutral company. And beyond that, what would it take to become carbon negative. We knew we needed the expertise of a carbon management firm to help us measure our emissions, consult with us and, ideally, certify our efforts when we reached carbon neutrality. Before going any further both in our process and in this writing, we can’t dismiss the specter of greenwashing, a marketing ploy that misleads the public into believing a company employs sound environment practices when it does not, or not to the degree it claims. Greenwashing sometimes isn’t intentionally sinister: it can happen when a company with good intentions doesn’t do its due diligence and ends up investing in a shell game-like system in which emissions still occur but get a different name amid all the self-congratulatory rhetoric: the quick fix that seems too good to be true because it is too good to be true. Is it too obvious to say that East Fork stands against greenwashing? Still, we know that with each passing day, the climate crisis worsens. We know it will take time to ensure that we find offsets that will create a financial market that will fund activities that slow or reverse climate change. And we wanted to start as soon as we could.