Are you in?

If you read the opening page of our 12th Sustainability report, we say “...the world needs companies to stand up” for the environment.

Logitech’s culture has always been humble, hard-working and growth-minded. We believe ‘actions speak louder than words.’ Like many companies, we never really commented on public issues. With regard to sustainability, we spent over a decade focused on reducing our environmental impact, but we hardly spoke about it publicly. 

About a year ago, we decided that our work to reduce Logitech’s environmental impact wasn’t enough. The world isn’t moving fast enough. As much as we’ve done and as far we’ve come, we also realized we weren’t ambitious enough about the pace of change needed. 

So we decided to be more aggressive. More ambitious for improvement. And more vocal. We stepped timidly into the public eye. Last year, we announced support of the Paris Climate Agreement, pledging to reduce our corporate carbon footprint to support the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees C. That “public step” was a little scary, stepping onto the world stage to talk about something beyond Logitech and its customers. Our first public declaration sounded very loud to us even though almost no one heard the ‘squeak’ from what many still think of as the little mouse company. What few heard was that we would be powered exclusively by renewable electricity by 2030, that we have neutralized the carbon footprint of our entire gaming product portfolio, and that it’s our intention to neutralize much more in the near term as we move ahead. We are supporting reforestation in Indonesia and other parts of the world to help restore oxygen and take out carbon.

While we thought no one heard us, it turned out a few started to notice. We were ranked fifth out of 145 tech companies for sustainability performance by Sustainalytics including in the 96th percentile for environmental sustainability. We were named one of 19 companies leading in environmental sustainability by World Finance magazine and, in fact, won the award for the second consecutive time this year.

But neither of those organizations knew what we were planning next. We were taking even bigger steps inside the company. Earlier this year we announced our carbon transparency commitment: we became the first consumer electronics company to commit to providing carbon footprint levels on every product we sell, right on the package. Our vision is a world where everything is labeled with its carbon impact (or neutrality), like calories on food labels. We believe this transparency will drive competition among companies to reduce product carbon footprint levels and give consumers information to make choices not only based on features and price, but also environmental impact. We called on, and are calling on, companies in every industry to join us, for only together can we show the change that is desperately needed.  

We are speaking up and acting for a core value: protecting the earth. And we are starting to find our voice.   

But before we appear to be publicly congratulating ourselves for our progress, I want to emphasize that we must face our reality first, the one we must change. Like virtually every organization in the world, especially those ‘making things,’ we still produce way too much carbon. Logitech created one million tons of carbon last year.  

We want to be held accountable for addressing this problem. We are aggressively attacking our carbon footprint through design and by neutralizing through offsets. We have begun to make mice from recycled plastic which requires a fraction of the carbon that new plastic requires and the share of our mice that will be from recycled plastic will grow over time. We are breaking down the carbon footprint of each component in each product and working to find ways to reduce each one’s carbon footprint. We have a long way to go to be carbon free, and that will still only be the beginning of our journey.

Just as we are aiming to slow global warming, we are also working to address the startling social inequality that still exists in the world. And just like sustainability, the problem starts well within our own control. Though we grew the gender diversity of our leadership from 15% to almost 50% and named our first ever woman as company Chair, we have far to go. We have terrible representation within our company overall and at every level from the Black community and other under-represented minorities. It took too long to wake us up, to wake me up, to our responsibility to act on the systemic racism that undermines these groups’ ability to enter, grow, and succeed inside Logitech or as our suppliers. We lack diversity and there’s so much work to be done to have a truly diverse and inclusive workplace.  

Now we are changing that. And we will transparently report our metrics and progress on diverse leadership, employees, and suppliers in addition to our carbon impact.  

We know that constant change is necessary. Change for the environment. Change for inclusion and an equal playing field for all. Transparency is key. We can perhaps make as big a difference with our transparency about our current state as we can with our aggressive steps to improve on it. You must admit to a problem before you can really fix it. The world has a problem. Logitech has a problem. And we will fix it.

I am so excited about our quest to be a great and responsible company for our employees, investors, humanity, and the Earth. Nothing less is worth aiming for. While we might always be a little mouse company to many, it’s amazing how mighty a mouse on a mission can be.