Advancing towards Net-Zero: Kvadrat Shade's circular design & renewable energy commitment

At Kvadrat Shade, we are committed to transition towards net-zero and we support circular building design. To achieve our goals, we plan to invest in substantial decarbonisation initiatives across our entire value chain.

Our approach to product design and production reflects our ambition to reduce carbon emissions through circular innovation and supporting a green energy transition. To overcome the decarbonisation challenge, we focus on our products, in terms of both designing and materials used, and on our production processes.

Our aim is to reduce the impact of processing and assembling our roller blinds in our own production facilities.- Our metallised textiles significantly improve building efficiency by providing better insulation, reducing the need for heating and cooling, and the associated CO2 emissions. Our products and solutions have the potential to minimise embodied carbon and to reach carbon neutrality in a year span. In alignment with our ambition to be fully transparent, in 2022 we launched our Carbon Neutrality Tool.

Our Carbon Neutrality Tool empowers you to explore different roller blind solutions for your projects and determine how long it would take them to achieve a state of carbon-neutrality. By considering various criteria such as textile type, location, orientation, and glazing, we can calculate energy savings and translate them into avoided CO2 emissions. The avoided carbon from building operations is then matched against the actual embodied carbon of our roller blinds, which includes the CO2 from textiles, hardware and transportation from assembly sites to customers.

In our pursuit of reaching net-zero, it became evident that offering carbon neutral solutions is only one aspect of fulfilling our ambitions. Recognizing the environmental impact associated with our production processes, we are proactively working toward s reduced energy consumption, increased electrification of heating and our production and making investments into renewable energy in our assembly and production sites in the Netherlands and Australia. Through these initiatives and more, we aim to drive our commitment to reach net-zero in the textile industry and beyond.

The Netherlands: powered by the sun

In our production facilities in Eibergen, the Netherlands, we have long started the transition to net-zero. In preparation for the installation of 2200 solar panels on our rooftop, which we currently lease to the solar panel owners, we have invested in improving our roof insulation. We have fully renovated the roof to increase the overall building efficiency when it comes to energy dispersion. As a consequence, we have seen a reduced energy consumption of 50%, compared to previous years.
Subsequently, 2200 solar cells have been installed with the aim of delivering all the energy we need to run our production operations. In 2022, the 2200 solar panels produced 840.000kWh of energy covering our total electricity consumption at Kvadrat Shade during that year.

Australia: towards becoming self-sufficient

Our Australian production facility is almost exclusively powered by electricity, primarily acquired from renewable energy sources. On the production site, we currently have a 100KW Photovoltaic (PV) system and we have invested in an expansion that increases the system to 300KW. This expansion will cover the entire remaining roof area with solar panels.

In rough terms it’s a 400-module expansion covering an additional 964m2, that will allow us to produce 98% of our annual operational electricity consumption, becoming almost self-sufficient. Furthermore, the expansion is anticipated to further decrease our dependence on external energy sources by an additional 44% compared to the already achieved reductions in 2022 and 2023. This will lead to a significant decrease of 216.6t of CO2 emissions, equivalent to removing 47.1 cars off the road.