ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY
At KLAFS, we understand that, as the leading manufacturer of sauna and spa products, we have a duty and responsibility to conduct our business in an environmentally sound way. Our mission is to offer our customers the most natural wellbeing experience possible. Harmony is our underlying principle: harmony for body & soul, and harmony between our day-to-day activity and nature. This environmental policy was set up in order to anchor these values within the company and beyond.
Ecological thinking starts at the very beginning of our value chain and carries through all our activities. For example, KLAFS heavily invests into research and development to enhance the life-cycle of the products and to optimize all resources involved. This investment resulted in the development of the KLAFS "Climate Manager", a control unit that optimizes the flow of oxygen into the sauna according to the usage of the sauna: during quieter periods the supply of oxygen is restricted, storing the heat inside the sauna and thereby reducing power consumption. Another important invention that needs to be mentioned in this context is the development and installation of a solar sauna that saves up to 70% of the energy necessary to run the sauna on sunny days.
All of our saunas are RAL-certified meaning that they meet or exceed the RAL-requirements in terms of heat insulation. Together with the “Climate Manager” our well-insulated saunas only need a minimum of energy to keep the temperature.
Consumption of natural commodities and resources has to be limited to a sustainable and self-renewable level throughout the activities of the company. We have identified three crucial areas where this principle is applied: raw materials, use of energy and emissions.
Wood is the most important raw material needed to produce saunas. Our wood is exclusively taken from sustainable forests and we carefully select our suppliers of tropical woods such as Abachi in order to protect forests and wildlife habitants. When the wood arrives in our factory, it is scanned by intelligent machinery to reduce the waste to the lowest possible level. The leftovers of this process are reused for heating our office facilities. All other types of waste are carefully separated and recycled.
The use of energy has always been an important issue to us, so we have equipped our company with energy saving technology where possible: movement detectors for the lights as well as energy saving light bulbs. Moreover our facilities are not on stand-by but they are completely turned off at nights and on weekends thanks to a "master switch". The company has also decided not to benefit from air conditioning within its premises.
KLAFS is committed to reducing the emissions that result from our industrial processes as well as from transporting our goods. Filters are a standard on all our plant and machinery. The distribution of our products is based on smart and strategic delivery routes.
We believe that KLAFS customers are also highly interested in the ecological debate. As our aim is to provide a long-lasting, natural wellbeing to our customers we consider the environmentally-friendly aspects in finishing our products to be essential. We exclusively use water-based varnishes and glazes to finish the exteriors of our cabins, olivine sauna stones are free of toxic gases and the interior of the sauna is simply untreated.
Senior Management take the responisbility of environment stewardship seriously. They are committed to comply with these regulations in vigour and they believe that its adherence will ultimately lead to a competitive advantage. These standards shall be propagated within the organization through its employees. This policy is not supposed to be static and will be continually developed to ensure that our Environmental Policy matches our market position.
