Snowberry is carbon neutral in your hands!

Snowberry is the first New Zealand beauty company to achieve carboNZero^Cert™ certification for each of its products, and may be the first in the World to do so.

CarboNZero certification (see the carboNZero logo on the Snowberry carton) means that Snowberry’s activities are measured and managed to be ‘carbon neutral.’ In other words, the carbon the company produces at any given time is neutralised by mechanisms such as registered forest regeneration, which extracts the same quantity of carbon dioxide from the air. Carbon dioxide is in fact the main culprit of several ‘greenhouse’ gases, which combine to create the blanket in the Earth’s atmosphere that is causing temperatures to rise and climate change to occur. The carboNZero programme in New Zealand is the only accredited ISO14065 greenhouse gas verifier outside of the United States of America and the world’s first internationally accredited greenhouse gas certification scheme, which comes under the auspices of the International Accreditation Forum (IAF). This accreditation means that Snowberry can measure and report product carbon footprint with a confidence that has been verified against a global standard and is accepted in 50 major world economies.

Snowberry currently sources carbon credits from a project which creates carbon credits through the generation of wind power. But it is not enough, under the carboNZero programme to simply offset greenhouse gas emissions with carbon credits. Snowberry is required to have an emissions management plan to ensure the continual measurement and monitoring of emissions and the implementation of ways to reduce them.

Snowberry’s commitment to being carbon neutral flows directly from founder Soraya Hendesi’s philosophy of creating anti-aging skincare she could trust. “The commitment we made as a team to be environmentally sustainable, simply reflected our personal values. We all have children and as far as we were concerned, Snowberry had to be environmentally sustainable for their sakes. Being carbon neutral is a huge part of that because it is at the heart of climate change. There is no bigger issue in the world today. If we don’t get that right, nothing else will matter.”

This is not a marketing matter she says. “The WWF has said that climate change is the biggest threat to nature and humanity in the 21^st Century.” Even worse, she says, is that climate change is mostly a result of the activities of us, the most privileged people on the planet, impacting on those who are most deprived – in Africa and Asia particularly. “Do we really stand aside and say we can’t afford to do what is simply right? Do we really tell our grandchildren that we don’t think we can make a difference?” 

“It gives me great pleasure to be able to say to one of our customers in Germany, or UK, or Spain, when you buy a Snowberry serum you know you have bought a product that honours its commitments.”