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During Green Week, we aim to keep the conversation on sustainability. As a company that re-circulates 50 000 photographic goods a year - ecologic sustainability has always been built into our daily lives. The last time we discussed what sustainability means for Kamerastore was back in 2022. Time has flown since and we have had to wrestle with new type of sustainability dilemmas so now is the perfect time to give an update on where Kamerastore is in 2024.
Today with this article I want to focus on two aspects of sustainability that get a bit too little attention in the public conversation, but that can be done by anyone anywhere:
- Focusing your efforts where it matters
- Limiting complexity when it matters
Focusing on where it matters:
A few weeks ago I was at a summit for circular economy electronics companies. Almost all of the over 500 organizations present dealt in laptops, mobile phones or servers. We were the only ones interested in cameras. In this perplexing world of B2B deals and companies buying 1000 laptops or 10 000 iPhones with the same specs, an encounter with Paolo Tosoratti, the Policy officer of the Ecodesign initiative in the European commission, clarified something for me:
We can blame the EU for bad vacuum cleaners!
Hold on - how do bad vacuum cleaners showcase what focusing your efforts does to sustainability? Well - vacuums that don't suck (literally) are a result of the last decades of EU regulation, which aimed all its efforts at removing energy from being used. Removing energy makes total sense in lamps and fridges as changing to LEDs has made lighting super efficient energywise and adding more insulation and better heat pumps to fridges also has a significant impact. It seems there is however very little you can do to the technology of a vacuum cleaner - it will just have less suction power if it needs to be using less energy.
Dropping energy consumption of the products that created 50% of EU's energy needs has been a success. The main resulting problem has been that consumers have not been willing to pay more for things that are more complex to make. So even if energy efficiency has been greatly improved, the quality of the machines has dropped leading to the machines having a much shorter lifespan. When 70% of the energy used by the average phone is already used in its manufacturing, making phones more energy efficient has just meant that the energy is just being used in China to create new ones instead of by the longer lasting phone charging in an European socket. Or the vacuum cleaner having to vacuum for double the time as the damn thing just doesn't suck the dirt on one go.
The good news: from 2025 the EU will start to focus on the energy usage of the whole lifecycle of the product - from manufacturing to end of life - regulating that the products need to last longer and be repairable by users. The goal is to set the standard of how long a product should be used to be much much longer than now.
The even better news if you are a photographer: the camera world has been far ahead of the curve in this aspect, and not just for film cameras: A digital camera from 2005 can be used just as fine now as it was then - what other electronic device of similar age can you say the same about?
Sustainability by focusing where it matters is an almost accidental result of the way Japanese and German engineers designed cameras - they just did things to last time. Therefore people can enjoy their products even 100 years after manufacturing. In our last article about sustainability we went deeper into this aspect of the human effort both in the product design and reusing process to make it possible, you can click here to read more.
Limiting complexity when it matters:
Since the 2022 article into sustainability, Kamerastore has kept growing and a new side of the business has emerged: manufacturing new products. Our internal startups, SantaColor film and VALOI scanning tools, assemble their products here under the same roof as the rest of our second hand processing.
Being able to manufacture and sell products in the linear way has honestly made our life much easier. We knew the circular economy was hard, but I don't think we quite knew how hard it was until we had really sold thousands of the same item for the first time. I understand even better now why companies tend to not look for circular models, when economic profitability is their ultimate goal.
However, even within the linear economy, there are different ways to manufacture and distribute things. Some are more sustainable ecologically, some more sustainable for humans and some are just in general good for society through taxes and innovation.
Here are a few choices we made for our own manufacturing:
1. SantaColor has been spooled by hand into recycled film canisters and then packaged in simple cardboard packaging without plastics. The typical new metal canister, new plastic can and plastic-wrapped 10-pack ‘bricks’ are all gone. It is probably, by far, the most ecologically sustainable way to package a roll of film, but even more importantly: It is the simplest way to solve the problem. Just hire 4 people to roll film all day for a year by hand.
Buying a machine to do it and using new plastic containers would have been cheaper in the end, but in the current economic climate and influx of Ukrainians to Finland, arranging for simple work to do was more important. Sustainability has multiple layers - it's not always about pure efficiency or the most obvious ecologically sustainable route (such as recycled plastic canisters).
2. Most scanning tools made in the last 10 years have created really really poor quality images. The Kodak/Agfa branded and Lidl film home scanners have tried to entice users with simple operation and a low price solving the problem of digitizing older generations' memories. These have been a “one product does everything” - approach where a webcam/phone-quality camera takes photos of the film. Even though the old wisdom goes: You can only pick 2 of the three main benefits for any service “Cheap, Fast or Good”, they seem to only have picked one - being cheap.
With VALOI we took the basic problem out of the design equation: We decided to use existing technology to do the digitalization of the image, we just provide a way for it to become a fast and good user experience. The result is a process where the user utilises a high quality DSLR or mirrorless camera for the digital imaging part of the digitization and VALOI provides the holders of the film that make high-quality reproduction easy.
This design choice limits the complexity of the product making it relatively easy to keep it going for decades in its intended purpose by just upgrading the camera when you need to. The design simplicity also makes the product manufacturable, for the most part, in Finland or within the EU.
These two examples were possible because our team designed the products to be done in such a way. Sustainability goes almost always back to the values and innovation surrounding the design. There are still faults in our processes though and we still have a lot of things planned to make the manufacturing we do even more sustainable.
But that’s not the only reason these two examples can be showcased here: both SantaColor and VALOI started with crowdfunding campaigns. Without that economic backup, the productisation process would have to be less sustainable as lower risk would have been required.
So thank you, if you contributed to their story! Or if you didn't, remember that your economic choices will always affect a long and usually much more complex supply chain than ours. Also, pondering and researching your options as a buyer matters: I for sure wish I hadn't bought that vacuum cleaner without googling for reviews.
– Juho
