We’re pleased to introduce you to one of the largest permanent carbon removal buyers in the world: Vestre!

Vestre is a Norwegian furniture manufacturer. They’re particularly focused on furniture within social settings, helping to create meeting places for millions of people across the world.

They’re also committed to finding the right ways to address the environmental impact of their business activities – targeting net zero carbon emissions. 

Vestre works with Variable on their overall net zero strategy, including calculating their emissions across Scopes 1, 2, and 3, and putting in place initiatives to reduce these emissions across the entire value chain, such as:

• Anti-throwaway by design – Vestre furniture is made to last, and they offer replacement parts for all furniture, and the option to return used furniture to their factory to be restored.

• Decarbonising materials: Vestre actively work to reduce the carbon intensity of their materials, for instance: environmentally certified Scandinavian timber, post-consumer recycled CIRCAL aluminium from Hydro and 60% lower emission zinc from Boliden.

• Renewable energy – Vestre’s rooftop solar panels produce 400 MWh of energy every year, covering 25% of the company’s energy use. They aim to increase this to 120% of their energy use by 2025, meaning they will be producing excess renewable energy to give back to the grid.

Of course, it’s very difficult to fully eliminate carbon emissions throughout the value chain of a business, and so Vestre had some remaining, unavoidable emissions for the year 2021-22.

So, in order to meet their net zero target, they worked with Lune to purchase carbon removals from our library of high-quality projects. 

They chose specifically to purchase only permanent carbon removal – carbon credits from projects which are removing existing emissions from the atmosphere and guaranteeing they will be safely stored for hundreds or thousands of years.

Vestre built a portfolio of carbon credits across the following carbon removal projects to neutralise 457 tCO2 of emissions:

• 336 tCO2 – Wakefield Biochar

• 100 tCO2 – 1PointFive Direct Air Capture

• 21 tCO2 –  CarbonCure Concrete Mineralisation

Through this, Vestre were able to neutralise their remaining Scope 1 and 2, and part of their remaining Scope 3 emissions. 

For the rest of the remaining Scope 3 emissions, they calculated what it would cost to buy carbon removal for this too, but have instead earmarked that as a budget to continue their focus on emissions reductions in their own value chain.  

Permanent carbon removal is essential to meet global net zero targets, and commitments by forward-thinking companies like Vestre are essential to enable that.

With so few businesses having bought carbon removal so far, this purchase put Vestre in the top 50 largest carbon removal buyers in the world!

Vestre’s purchases – including the carbon credit certificates – are also publicly available via their Lune Sustainability Page, adding transparency and accountability to their offsetting. 

To learn more about Lune's library of high-quality carbon projects, including permanent carbon removal projects like those Vestre bought carbon credits from, go to lune.co/projects.