Buy the headphones, we plant a tree and the world is saved!


Valco wants to look like the good guys and sell lots of headphones. Since everyone else is doing this kind of thing these days, we figured we'd launch our own environmental campaign too. Obviously it's greenwashing when a company does something like this. No point dancing around it. Let's be honest. The nice thing is that it both does some good for the environment AND makes us money.
Under this campaign we've set ourselves the goal of planting one sapling for every pair of headphones sold, including the ones already sold. We don't plant them one by one as headphones go out the door, we do it in big batches (the way planting actually gets done).
Unlike other corporate greenwashing campaigns, we ourselves go out to some swamp in the middle of nowhere and plant (almost) all the promised saplings with our own little hands. We can't afford to hire some political party's youth wing to do the planting for us, so we plant them ourselves and drag our own kids and family members along for the ride.
Okay fine, on top of the ones we plant ourselves we also have to source saplings elsewhere, we don't have the capacity for all of it. That's because sales have exceeded expectations.
Valco's plantings started in spring 2021 and in the first summer alone, on our own and together with others, we already planted well over ten thousand saplings, which adds up to several hectares of forest. Of those, we ourselves planted roughly half with our own little hands.
If everything goes well, we'll buy more land, plant more, and let it grow. Then the squirrels can run around in peace and the rabbits can get busy.
10,000 saplings = a whole lot of sequestered carbon dioxide
According to some study (Malmodin & Lundén, 2018), 320 million pairs of headphones are sold worldwide every year. Their combined "carbon footprint" is 3.2 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent (or thereabouts). Doing some quick math, that means a single pair of headphones has a carbon footprint of 10 kilos. Correct us if we got it wrong, math is not our strong suit. You can already tell from our margins.
(3.2 M tonnes CO2 / 320 M headphones = 0.01 tonnes CO2 per pair)
According to another, commercial tree-planting outfit, planting 43 saplings offsets 10,000 kilos of CO2. From this you could deduce that planting one tree equals a 233 kilo reduction in emissions. At this point the numbers start blurring, but in other words, every pair you buy from us saves the world by quite a few pairs' worth of headphones.
So by buying Valco noise cancelling headphones, you offset more than you consume.
Actually, you offset everything you could possibly buy from us. And if our numbers are completely off the rails, you still offset something. By buying enough pairs for the company, you can offset the CEO's trip to Pattaya. If you want, you can also offset adultery and a small penis.
No, but seriously, environmental protection isn't an indulgence sale. So don't go thinking, now that I've offset, I can do whatever I want. Either way, these are probably the only headphones in Finland whose emissions have been compensated for in some manner.

Offsetting carbon and giving the entrepreneur something to do
No point pretending we're doing this purely out of the goodness of our hearts. The point of this greenwashing campaign is mostly to sell new headphones, but sure, also to do our little part to save the world.
The more headphones go out the door, the closer we get to our ultimate goal: building a Death Star in orbit.
As a bonus, we promise to film the planting sessions for social media. So you can sit on your couch sipping lemonade and listening to your favorite music through excellent headphones with a clean conscience, and have a laugh while the entrepreneur is out in the woods being eaten alive by deer flies.
The aforementioned study on the carbon footprint of headphones: Malmodin, J., & Lundén, D. (2018). The Energy and Carbon Footprint of the Global ICT and E&M Sectors 2010–2015. Sustainability, 10(9), 3027. doi: 10.3390/su10093027
