Sustainability

At Novation, we recognise the climate emergency that we’re living through, and are taking steps to reduce our environmental footprint as much as possible. We’re committed to transparency, both on our progress and what our targets are.

We are aiming to have carbon neutral business operations in 2024, and carbon neutral products by 2030.

To read more about our approach to Environmental Sustainability, visit our PLC site.

Upfront raw materials

Upfront raw materials

At the highest level, there are only three major material categories in Focusrite products: metal, plastic, and electronics. Of these three categories, we can choose what metal and plastic goes into our products, but we rely on a few large suppliers for our electronics, so our influence here is limited. Here’s what we’re doing on these areas:
Metal Plastic Electronics

Novation Usage Examples

Usually for the chassis of products, but also for fixings and internal brackets.

Front panels, some chassis and switch caps.

All PCBs and components.

Summary

Metal requires high quantities of energy and resources to extract from the ground (and causes significant environmental damage in the process), but most metals we use are infinitely recyclable, so we’ve been actively looking for suppliers of recycled metal.

Plastic production doesn’t produce the same levels of greenhouse gas emissions as metal, but it relies on fossil fuels as the raw material. We are looking into recycled and bio- based plastic options that retain the structural rigidity that we need, as recycled plastic usually ends up degraded through each recycling loop.

Electronics are where we have the least control, but we can still reduce the amount of electronics to the minimum that achieves the target performance. We can also ensure that the products can be easily disassembled at the end of life so the valuable elements can be recovered. We also follow up with our suppliers regularly, checking on their progress to reduce their environmental impact through measures such as installing renewable energy and reducing resource consumption.

Ability to Influence

High

Medium

Low

GHG Emissions Impact

High

Low

Medium
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Our research shows that anywhere between 20-75% of a product’s total footprint is locked in with the materials we choose, so we’re exploring all opportunities to swap out materials for more sustainable options, starting with individual trial runs before scaling up to mass production volumes.
Energy consumption

Energy consumption

The power our products consume is something we review in every design cycle. It is also inherently tied up with external factors — every country’s energy grid varies, so our customers power usage will be affected by the grid in their home country. All our products must draw power to operate, so our strategy here is to reduce consumption as much as possible so we are best placed to take advantage of the electricity supply decarbonising over time.

Energy consumption is a difficult balancing act — new features often require more power. We’ve been working to optimise power consumption as much as possible for fixed sets of features and, in the last 10 years we’ve been able to benefit from improvements in power supply design. As the core functionality of Scarlett 2nd and 3rd Gen are the same, we optimised the power consumption to achieve a 20% improvement in power efficiency, while also improving audio performance. We’ve also moved from linear power supplies where efficiency could be around 60%, to switched-mode supplies which are at least 83% efficient — this same technology has been applied to our PCBs to maximise efficiency. Our work has made our products run cooler, which improves long term reliability and energy efficiency.

  • Focusrite Scarlett 2i2

    Our sister brand Focusrite's internal research has shown that on 3rd Gen products almost half of the emissions in production still originate from the aluminium chassis. Recycled Aluminium is an infinitely recyclable material and has the potential to eliminate up to 90-95% of the upstream emissions associated with mining and extracting new material.
  • Aluminium

    Starting back in 2020, we worked with our suppliers to identify a source of post-industrial recycled (PIR) aluminium that could be extruded to the tight tolerances required and started trials with this new material. This new grade of aluminium presented its own challenges, having come from a range of different processes it needed to be cleaned up appropriately to remove impurities before it would be usable.
  • Shipping

    Through multiple refinement cycles, our engineers have now perfected a process of cleaning and preparing this material for production, and recycled Scarlett units are now beginning to ship to customers.

    This is just the start of our journey with Scarlett. Diversifying our aluminium sources to include other waste streams is an important next step. This will allow us to place ourselves within the wider circular economy. We will also be able to expand the use of this recycled Aluminium into our other product ranges as a drop-in change.
  • Making Scarlett greener

    It's more important than ever to do all we can to make interfaces that consider the environment. We’re working hard to make Scarlett greener and we’re carrying this through with sustainability in mind — for our customers who care about what impact their purchases have on the environment and because it’s the right thing to do.

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