Kris here. Every now and then I like to pop in and talk about something, and today it’s our (roughly) annual report to you on our attempts to make NE as environmentally friendly and sustainable as possible. We have several core values here at NE, and Sustainabilitas is one. We care about the impact our business has on the planet, and we want to do what we can to minimize that footprint. We do these posts semi-regularly because we think it’s important to be held accountable.

We have some great updates that we’re really proud of this year.

1% for the Planet

We have received our annual certification from 1% for the Planet. By joining 1% for the Planet, we have committed to donating at least 1% of our revenue (not profit) to environmental charities. Their team vets environmental partners to ensure they have an environmental mission in one of the 1% for the Planet Impact Area Targets, that at least ⅔ of the programs budget aligns with Impact Areas, and perhaps most importantly, it’s actually doing the work and not just greenwashing the problems.

Although we’ve been committed to our conservation partnerships since 2017, we’ve only been certified as 1% members since 2023, and our 2024 certification has renewed our joy at supporting these causes.

We’ve been partnering with a variety of organizations for the past several years, and this year we plan to do a bit more to post about them. Look for deep dives on the blog over the coming months where we talk a bit more about each of our partners and what they are doing.

We’ve added a page to our website that goes through some of the highlights and our environmental partners.

Amphibian Foundation Milestone

We’ve been working with Amphibian Foundation since 2022. We’ll tell you much more about them in an upcoming post, but for now I’ll tell you that they have been working hard to conserve a number of endangered amphibians. One endangered species they work with, the striped newt (Notophthalmus perstriatus), occurs only in Georgia and Florida, USA. With our 2024 donation to AF, we at Noise Engineering have contributed more to the conservation of this species than the states of Florida and Georgia combined. We are extremely proud of this, but also a bit sad that it’s true.

We’re a CA Green Business

Last year marked our certification as a California Green Business at the highest level: the Innovator level. The Core level requires a commitment to a variety of environmental goals, and the Innovator level takes it a bit further, focused on the community. As a Green Business at this level, we have demonstrated that we pay our team a living wage, offer a retirement plan, provide health care for everyone, and more. We are thrilled to achieve this recognition.

We’ve Made Several Improvements in Operations

We’ve made a few changes behind the scenes and a few in front of the scenes.

First off, we now run NE HQ (also known as Stephen and Kris’s house) on 100% renewable power. If this sounds cool to you, check with your utility. For us, we just had to fill out a simple form on the LADWP website to make the transition (and in true Kris form, she found bugs with the submission process that they’ve since fixed!). That means the vast majority of our operations, our website, our plugin back end…it all runs on renewable energy and not fossil fuels.

Last year we had a goal of removing plastics from our packaging and we are finally on a path to do this. Our number one repair issue is damage from shipping. While it’s rare, it’s more common than we’d like. Because it appears that our packages are dropkicked to their final destination sometimes, we were really looking for a sustainable solution that would be more protective than the plastic bubble bags we were using. We have finally found one, and we’re in the process of making that transition. We will use the remainder of what we have in the old packing, and we won’t re-pack previously built and packaged products, but the more sustainable packing will, over time, include all our products. We also worked with our manufacturer to remove plastic packing tape from our supply chain, in favor of a more sustainable paper tape. Seriously, that plastic tape never breaks down.

Finally, we’re proud to be in the process of moving all of our product boxes to a more sustainable solution. We’ll continue to use kraft boxes for reasons we’ve outlined before (summary: more eco friendly than bleached paper), but we’re moving to a supplier who has a sustainability plan and provides options that are at least some portion recycled.

Reducing Shipping

Shipping is one of our biggest footprints, and we can’t make it not happen. We offset our carbon usage by an order of magnitude above what we know we use with our partner Seatrees. In addition, our website is built on Shopify. If you purchase from us directly, and pay with ShopPay, they will offset the shipment, so your shipment is double-offset! That’s great, but we’re always looking for ways to decrease the amount of shipping we do.

We’ve changed up how our warranty repairs work. Our products still come with a lifetime warranty on manufacturing. We have long worked with people to try to minimize the number of modules that need to be shipped to us for repair (that’s one reason we ask for a photo on our module repair form. You’d be surprised how many issues we can diagnose just from that, and how many of those allow us to have a customer solve the issue themselves, often without a drop of solder!). Where it makes sense, we always ship a replacement daughterboard rather than shipping things both ways. But the few repairs we get from Europe have always bothered us because there is just so much shipping…

We are pleased to have partnered with a small UK-based team to handle UK repairs, and as of the end of March, another for EU repairs. This should reduce latency and costs for everyone involved, and make your experience with Noise Engineering products even more enjoyable knowing that should something happen, a repair will be simple.

We’ve also moved into the world of guitar pedals in the past year. One of the bigger problems we had was sourcing enclosures locally. Luckily, we found a great solution! It turns out there’s a great place just up the road from us who can make really gorgeous metal works, and we’re pleased to partner with them on custom pedal enclosures, as well as some things we have coming soon! This allows us to decrease our shipping footprint on pedals, as they are made in Pasadena and shipped directly to our contract manufacturer in Orange County, CA.

A lot of things are staying the same

A lot has not changed.

We love our contract manufacturing partner. We have an incredible relationship with them. They feel like family at this point! We will continue to build all of our products here in sunny Southern California. Our manufacturer also serves as our distributor, so when you order from us (or when a shop orders from us), it comes directly from them. This means that we don’t have to ship the products to our house or to a third-party fulfillment group only to ship them once again. 

I’ll throw my annual reminder in here that this model is the opposite of what some of the big players like Amazon, Walmart, etc. do: They push inventory between multiple warehouses based on demand, shipping multiple times in some cases, in order to make it easy for you to get things in 24 hours. Our shipping team is small (one person!), and our model means sometimes things take a few days to get out the door, but know that we’re always working to get things in your hands as fast as possible.

None of this is possible without you

We are here because of you. We know our products aren’t the cheapest out there, because doing things the way we do them costs money. We appreciate your support, whether you’re choosing our products because you believe in our mission or if you’re buying them just because. It’s a pretty tough time in the industry, and in the economy, and we know a lot of people are struggling. We appreciate your support, whether it’s a purchase or just a kind email or social media comment. And we’re not done -- sustainability is an ongoing process. There’s always more that can be done, and we hope we have even more new and fun things to report next year.