Knowledge deal: a guest of Arion and EMMA Safety Shoes

And suddenly you find yourself in front of a piece of the Berlin Wall. Weird? No, not if you know you are stepping into Arion. A medical device company and a company that is and wants to be a frontrunner. Erik Joosten is the founder and CEO of Arion. A man with a vision and a man with guts. A few years ago, for example, he dared to build his office on the border of Germany and the Netherlands. Why? Because he could, and because it appeals to the imagination and therefore attracts.

Members of shiftLimburg are today guests of Arion. To hear how Arion applies the Sustainable Development Goals, which are important to them, in practice. And in this way contributes to a sustainable society. And that is not self-evident. It requires a strategy. Arion makes a strategic plan every three years. But the key is also to free up manpower for this. The ultimate goal is to work towards intrinsic motivation throughout the company. Difficult sometimes because it also creates resistance. Fabian Groven set to work on this at Arion. Fabian no longer works at Arion but at EMMA Safety Footwear. He is the second guest speaker today.

Arion has two products: Arion Slide Solutions, the donning aids for compression stockings, and Swash®, special wipes and washcloths that allow you to wash without water. Both products focus on easing care and encouraging patient independence. What inspires and motivates Arion is seeing people simply smile when using their products.

From a healthcare perspective, there is an increasing focus on sustainability. Although in practice it is often still difficult to realize. How nice that you then see how much water a hospital can save by using Swash®. Apart from the ease of use for the care providers. And Arion is cashing in on this water savings by donating clean drinking water to the Made Blue Foundation for every package of Swash®. They make sure the water gets to where it is needed most. For example, in slums in third world countries. And Erik saw this with his own eyes when he visited a slum: for 500 people there was 1 toilet and 1 shower available. It needs no explanation what this means in terms of hygiene and risk of infection.

How sustainable is a disposable product anyway?

Very often Erik gets the question: how can a disposable product be sustainable? A fair question. In order to understand and provide insight into this, Arion has had a so-called life cycle analysis (LCA) carried out with regard to the environmental impact. The outcome: Swash® has 74% less environmental impact than traditional washing. Look, and those are facts you can use to convince customers. Arion is not environmentally friendly, but it is certainly less harmful to the environment. But sustainability starts much earlier. With your product design. And they are working hard on that at Arion.

Connection is the power

In addition to focusing on their products, Arion is also looking at the internal organization and its role in the ecosystem. Internally, much attention is paid to diversity in the composition of the workforce: in gender, education but also in terms of nationality. And that is good, because it creates dynamics and teaches you to look at things from different perspectives. Proudly, Erik explains that Arion contributes to the medical cluster of the Parkstad region. Here, 5,500 people work in medical logistics. And together with partners we are looking at what added value this cluster can offer.

And then Fabian Groven takes over. Working for three months now at EMMA Safety Footwear: manufacturer of safety footwear. EMMA is also known as a frontrunner when it comes to sustainability. But for Fabian, just as during his time at Arion, what mattered to him was the intrinsic motivation at EMMA to operate sustainably. That's not only a nice aspiration, but being intrinsically engaged also increases the likelihood of being able to comply with the laws and regulations that come our way.

We are more than eating our way around

But before Fabian addresses whether the EMMA shoe is truly circular, he first discusses the urgency of the global commitment to sustainability. In doing so, he points to Kate Raworth's book "The Donut Economy. She talks about our current bankrupt economic system: we do not distribute our resources properly and we exceed ecological boundaries. The way we live now, we would need three globes in 2050 to meet our consumption needs. This is not sustainable, that is clear.

In the Netherlands alone, 130 million kilograms of clothing are thrown away each year. That's quite a mountain of waste. 10% of the shoes produced end up unsold in this landfill. Looking at the CO₂ impact, shoe production contributes "only" 1.4% to global emissions. The impact of safety shoes in this context is about 0.05%. That's not much, but it doesn't exonerate us indicates Fabian to do otherwise.

Everything used to be better

But back now to EMMA Safety Footwear. EMMA dates back to the State Mines. Working conditions back then were tough. Some workers at one point were no longer physically able to do the work in the mine. It was the company's responsibility to keep these people working, and a branch within the company was set up where these workers would repair shoes of colleagues. This is not only circular avant la lettre (refurbishment) but also socially conscious. Today, 53% of the people at EMMA still work with some distance from the labor market.

How circular can you be

In 2018, it was presented that EMMA had the circular sustainability shoe. Upon joining the company, Fabian wanted to explore how that is now, six years on. As a framework, he used the so-called R-ladder for this purpose. This ladder has six steps and each step indicates the degree of circularity: the higher up the ladder, the better you actually do.

His conclusion: actually, EMMA is still relatively at the bottom of the ladder. But it is indeed operating circularly and climbing the ladder more and more. In fact, EMMA uses a lot of recycled materials. For example, for all shoes, the laces, inner lining and insoles are made from recycled material. But EMMA goes further, wants to go further. Its most sustainable shoe is The Mine. Here even the heel is already made from waste material (PUR foam) and the soles are made from rubber waste.

Does that make the shoe circular? No, because you can't take it apart in layers like this. Nor would that be desirable, since it is, after all, a safety shoe. The safety shoes are now collected and go in their entirety to a third-party shredder. Then the outcome is separated by weight into separate streams. These residual streams are now resold, but in time you could and would want to use them again to make new shoes.

So like Arion, the challenge at EMMA lies in product design. How can you design the shoe so that your residual material produces a cleaner recycling stream with the higher goal of high-quality application ín a new safety shoe.

Know what you produce

Beautifully, EMMA also creates a material passport for each shoe. In this digital passport you specify exactly what is in the shoe. Because that too will be part of the new laws and regulations, for example with regard to extended producer responsibility. You remain responsible as a producer, even if the product reaches waste status. And with a passport, the recycling party knows exactly what's inside.

This is how we are all part of the circular system. Yes, because we have to do it together. Alone is linear. Together is circular.