Sustainability
MERCURY DASHA ensures that it pursues a sustainable, and low impact fashion and design business.
Our tech driven strategy is part of this approach and you can read more about how digital first contributes to our sustainability strategy here.
Apart from this we also are engaging in a number of sustainability projects that meet our values of being transparent, impactful and pragmatic.
Carbon Offset Backed By Blockchain Technology
We recently introduced an integration with Earthchain to enable us to become a carbon-neutral business.
Earthchain is a UK based blockchain integrated platform which calculates the C02 estimate of a physical item (not just the shipping component) using well researched and published methodologies.
The integration means that for each purchase bought the carbon cost is 100% offset. These carbon offsets are used to fund certified Gold Standard projects in one of four groups: community, water, forests and energy. These help with reducing emissions in a variety of ways for example, implementing renewable energy projects, or replacing high carbon fuels with lower impact alternatives.
Many Gold Standard initiatives also have knock on effects on other development metrics, such as community health and wellbeing.
The part we especially love is that each and every carbon offset is made fully traceable on Earthchain’s distributed Carbon Ledger running on the Stellar blockchain - a low energy network. The use of blockchain technology ensures full traceability and accountability of exactly which projects are being invested in via the carbon offset programme.
Circularity, Locality & Slow Fashion
A large part of our ethos is to slow down fashion. We do this by using digital fashion and technology to limit our production of physical inventory.
We also build in circularity into our supply chain by using recyclable and reusable fabrics and use Web 3 integrated products to increase the incentives for a robust secondary market.
For example, one of our recent initiatives has been to build in certification into our physical garments and link them with digital collectibles to ensure consumers have an incentive to sell their physical item with their NFT on a secondary market.
We also allow customers to send the tee-shirts we produce back to us to recycle and get money back towards their next purchase through our Community Tee programme.
Finally, a large part of our ethos is to bring back local craftsmanship and we love supporting UK fashion - so we produce all of our physical items in London and the UK. This also helps us reduce our footprint as we do not ship samples and production from abroad.
We are constantly looking for pragmatic and innovative solutions to make a real impact and generate a massive shift in the fashion industry.