Last year, TPi had the pleasure of sitting down with Françoise Cardoso, Director of Corporate Social Responsibility for L-Acoustics. With a history of working in the food industry, she brought her skills over to the entertainment sector with the goal of helping L-Acoustics formalise a comprehensive strategy for sustainable practices. Now with her feet firmly under the table at the loudspeaker company, we were keen to reconnect and get her thoughts on what companies within the sector could be doing to push the envelope.
“When it comes to sustainability, we have three pillars of focus: planet, people and sound,” explained Cardoso. “This involves preserving and caring for our planet, empowering our people and communities, and promoting sound in society.”
Cardoso highlighted some of the endeavours the company had enacted in relation to that first pillar. “Our teams led the creation of a carbon assessment for the company, analysing all our 2023/2024 data,” she stated. “We partnered with expert third-party Ekodev Limited to validate our work and ensure its credibility. We’re also engaging in the SBTi (Science Based Target Initiatives) to calculate our trajectory in line with the Paris Agreement. Both these initiatives mean we can identify areas for improvement.”
The company has also renewed its contract with the WEEELogic programme, a pan-European one-stop compliance hub for the take-back and recycling of electrical and electronic equipment, as well as waste batteries and packaging.
Recently, L-Acoustics rolled out its ‘reparability index’. Cardoso elaborated: “Our focus on this index will extend the life of our products and naturally result in less waste as time goes on. Our goal by the end of the year is to have an index for all our loudspeakers, and then we’ll turn our focus to indexing our electronic components.” While discussing many of the internal projects, Cardoso expressed the need for collaboration between businesses when it came to the topic of sustainability. “One project we’ve joined is M.A.T.R.I.C.E., a French government-supported initiative aimed at fostering green alternatives for touring, which has also brought in names such as Live Nation. The goal is to find the ‘pain points’ as far as carbon consumption – be that transport or energy consumption.” This collaboration led L-Acoustics to work on the life cycle analysis of its products.
Cardoso was keen to shine a light on other projects that have been borne from the entertainment industry, which she believed were making huge steps forward in terms of environmental awareness – notably the Sounds Right campaign, started by the Museum for the United Nations. The aim is to recognise the value of nature, prompt conversation, raise funds for conservation through an innovative mechanism, and inspire millions of fans to act.
“Artists use our sound solutions, so it’s important that we are part of this – without artists we would not have any solutions in the market – and more musicians are conscious of environmental issues,” Cardoso added. “If we can support and help with our products and the amplified controllers and the way we manufacture our loudspeakers, then we should do so.”
She added: “These initiatives are the result of our teams’ commitment to environmental challenges and their determination to combine sustainability, quality, and performance throughout the value chain.”
In closing, Cardoso underlined the importance of staying ahead of the curve, as in a short time many sustainable actions would soon be enshrined in law. “Take the sourcing of materials such as wood,” she explained. “This is already being regulated more strictly, but we see this as an opportunity to explore alternative ways of sourcing raw materials. It’s about reframing the challenge and asking: what opportunities does this create?”
Read the full story below…
Words: Stew Hume
Photo: L-Acoustics
