As a brand, f-stop has been focused on environmental accountability since the company launched in 2006. We come from the outdoors so it’s in our blood. A simple early example happened in 2010 when we stopped using plastic poly bags for our packs and went to fabric dust covers which can be used independently as a laundry bag / sleep bag cover / etc. This is more than a decade earlier than some big brands who have built their entire reputation on being “sustainable” & “green”

In our circular economy, we have a 5 R system. Starting with the least impact and moving to worst (recycled).

• Reduce: making higher quality items that last longer is the easiest way to minimise environmental impact. Easy example, most f-stop bags last 10+ years… that is significantly higher than average. This also has the added benefit of making f-stop one of the cheapest brands when considering TCO – total life time cost of ownership.
• Reuse: anything that can be reused cuts down on environmental impact. Because f-stop has a modular system, many of the parts are interchangeable. You can use ICUs (interchangeable camera units) and GateKeeprs on most of our packs. This means you don’t need to buy the same ICU multiple times, you can share across the transportation platform and reduce the environmental impact.
• Repurpose:  this comes third because it takes extra energy to repurpose something. Our example here is our packaging. The DuraDiamond packs come in a salvaged fabric bag. This fabric bag can be used for a lot of things – not only as a dust cover. We have the additional benefit of this material being salvaged: this material is a waste product in the manufacturing process of an expensive fabric for a big outdoor brand; it would go to a landfill if we didn’t take it and repurpose it for our packaging.
• Repair: repairing a pack is much easier than repairing electronics. If you break a zipper, you can get it repaired almost anywhere that does shoes. In addition, this year we will be sharing most of our patterns for free online. This means anyone can easily modify or even make their own pack from our designs (for non commercial use – similar to open source software). We as a brand can do this because we own our patterns (most brands use contract manufacturing and those factories own the patterns). We also think this is important to make it easier for our packs to be repaired by each person – we will always do free repairs, but it’s always faster and cheaper to do local.
• Recycle:  we put recycling last for a lot of reasons – it takes energy, uses chemicals, is weaker when original. Of course it’s better than putting things into a landfill, but not by much… compostable (non commercial compostable) is a small exception, but very few companies do residential compostable packaging…