NOWN’s Commitment to Sustainability and Innovation: A Detailed Environmental Evaluation

NOWN is renowned for creating groundbreaking architectural products and award-winning custom projects. With a multidisciplinary team dedicated to client visions, NOWN emphasizes detail-oriented precision, sustainability, and environmentally friendly acoustic solutions. All products are manufactured in Amsterdam, showcasing European craftsmanship and innovation.

NOWN has always placed sustainability at the core of their operations. To further this commitment, we have commissioned Eco Intelligent Growth (EIG) to perform an in-depth environmental evaluation of our product line, aiming to quantify and improve NOWN’s environmental impact.

The primary goals of this initiative are:
– To analyze the environmental performance of all standard products, categorized into four families: aluminum, steel, PET, and InfiKnit (woven PET).
– To publish four Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) that transparently show the environmental impacts of the products, using Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology.

EIG’s Role:
– Conducting a comprehensive LCA for each product family to understand the full spectrum of environmental impacts from raw material extraction to end-of-life.
– Using Brightway2, an advanced LCA software, to calculate both required and optional impact indicators, ensuring precise compliance with international standards.
– Supporting NOWN throughout the process of developing, verifying, and publishing the EPDs.
– Compiling a detailed report along with the four EPDs, covering each product family comprehensively.

The evaluation yielded several important findings:
– Extensive Analysis: a thorough review of 317 product and usage scenario combinations was completed.
– Detailed Data Collection: NOWN’s meticulous data gathering allowed for the inclusion of multiple parameters, such as exact measurements of energy consumption, processing time, and waste production.
– Complex Installation Scenarios: the EPDs included five additional installation scenarios, which demonstrated how impacts vary with different installations, such as vertical walls versus ceilings or the inclusion of polycarbonate layers for LED integration.

EPDs offer several significant advantages:
– Transparency: they provide clear, verifiable information about a product’s environmental impact throughout its lifecycle, including production, distribution, use, and end-of-life stages.
– Comparison: EPDs enable consumers and clients to compare products within the same category based on sustainability criteria.
– Continuous Improvement: detailed knowledge of environmental impacts helps companies identify areas for improvement, fostering ongoing innovation and refinement of processes and products.

Through meticulous analysis and transparent reporting of environmental impacts, NOWN knows the details of the impact hotspots that provides more information for the improvement of the product design and the value chain in order to contribute positively to environmental sustainability.

For more information about our sustainable practices and products, get in contact with our team at [email protected].

A collaborative article written by Eco Intelligent Growth (EIG) and NOWN.