6 BETTER PLANET
Truth in Transparency
To preserve a healthy planet, our Environmental Sustainability team is reducing our footprint while creating more sustainable products and services.
Design for Environment
It's exactly as it sounds. We're designing products with the environment in mind, integrating sustainability into our product innovation and benefiting the consumer in the process. One of our latest toilet innovations began in response to a demand to decrease time to clean and chemical toxicity impact. Employing the Design for Environment philosophy, our design and engineering teams created ContinuousClean, a technology that automatically dispenses cleaning solution with each flush to keep the bowl cleaner between flushes-5x longer than a traditional toilet. They also redesigned the shape of the toilet and the flushing technology to maximize the power and effectiveness of the flush, while using CleanCoat surface treatment to prevent bacteria, mildew, and mineral deposits from sticking. The result is a cleaner flush, reduced use of cleaning solutions, and lower exposure to toxic chemicals-i.e., great consumer experience in addition to favorable environmental impact.
Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) and Declare labels tell us how a product was manufactured, what materials they contain, and where the materials came from. The process is third-party verified, and the label details the chemical makeup of a product, life expectancy, and lists any materials that could harm our health or pollute the environment. Think of it as a nutrition label for a product. Requests for EPDs have grown exponentially, with more than 700 requests in 2020. EPDs and Declare labels are increasingly requested by architects, designers, and end users in an effort to achieve LEED certification and make informed purchases around the health and environmental responsibility of the products in their homes and commercial spaces. Since 2014, Kohler has received over 2,000 transparency requests. In 2020, 65% of our transparency requests were for EPD's, and 35% were for Declare Labels with 71% of those requests from North America and 29% from various other countries. As part of our commitment to supporting green building and environmental design, Kohler has over 5,000 EPD's available-more than any other building products manufacturer. Beginning with vitreous china products in 2014, we've expanded our EPD capabilities across markets and product lines, most recently adding more than 80 percent of our faucet SKUs to the program in 2020.
80%
OF GLOBAL FAUCET SKU'S ADDED TO EPD PROGRAM
Transparency Progress
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