1. Reduce: making higher quality items that last longer is the easiest way to minimize environmental impact. Easy example, most f-stop bags last 8+ 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 lifetime 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 GateKeepers 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.
2. Repurpose:  It takes extra energy to repurpose something. Our example here is our packaging. The DuraDiamond® packs come in a salvaged fabric bag and much like this example, repurposing f-stop gear is the best way to breath new life into it.
3. 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.
4. 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…

Here we will put content related to the dead and stock fabric.  A little introduction here should do and we can always link to a specific dead stock fabric page for more details.  Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Donec faucibus, elit eu luctus suscipit, ante libero lacinia arcu, sit amet aliquam nulla elit venenatis enim. Aliquam rutrum nisl eu vehicula fermentum.

Because most of production happens in-house, we are able to do some very interesting things! Of course, we do our best to “Tetris” the placement of all cuttings for pieces, and with our auto-laser cutter our precision is very high. Even with all that, there are spaces between the pieces… We save those and turn them into secondary items (we do this with many fabrics and for several of our Brand Partners). They are then able to do whatever they want with them!

For a brand like f-stop, we make protective sleeves which we then trade (not sell) for an Act of Kindness. Of course, Zero-Waste is a goal, its never really achievable because it takes energy to create solar panels which create energy to power the machines to make items, but we try our best!