Valco Greenwashing campaign

Buy our headphones, well plant a tree, and the world shall be saved!

Update on the situation in the summer of 2021 – roughly 10 000 saplings have been planted!

Valco wants to look like a hero and sell a lot of headphones. Because there are a lot of others doing something like this, we wanted to get in on the environmental bandwagon. Of course, it’s always greenwashing when a company does something like this. We’re not going to deny it, let’s be honest. All in all, this is a great thing, because while it does good for the environment, it also makes us money. 

In this campaign, our goal is to plant a tree sapling per one pair of headphones sold – this includes the ones already sold. We’re not planting them as they are sold, but in larger bunches (as you do when planting trees).

Unlike those other greenwashing campaigns, however, we actually take to the forest and plant (almost) all the saplings with our own tiny hands. We can’t afford hiring a bunch of girl scouts to plant them. Instead, we’re using our children and family members as free and only moderately forced labor.

Well, ok, in addition to the ones we plant we are going to have to buy tree saplings from somewhere else. We don’t have the capacity for everything. This is because our sales have exceeded expectations. 

We started planting in the spring of 2021 and we and the others have planted almost 10 000 saplings, which equals several hectares of forest. About half of this we did by ourselves. 

We probably can’t plant any more this summer because we don’t have any more land to plant to. If everything goes well, we can buy more land to plant and let the trees grow. Then it will become an excellent place for the squirrels to run and rabbits to mate.

10 000 saplings = a metric f*cktonne of bound carbon dioxide

According to some study (Malmodin & Lundén, 2018) 320 million pairs of headphones are sold per year. The combined “carbon footprint” of them is 3.2 million carbon dioxide equivalent tonnes (or around there somewhere). Based on these calculations, we roughly estimated that a single pair of headphones equals about 10 kilos of carbon emissions. Correct us if we’re wrong, maths isn’t our strong suit. You can see it in our prices.  

(3.2 M CO2 tonnes / 320 M headphones = 0.01 CO2 tonnes / headphone)

According to an another, bigger tree planting campaign, planting 43 saplings equals 10 000 kilos of carbon dioxide. From this can be deduced that planting a single tree equals 233-kilo reduction in carbon emissions. 

At this point all the numbers start sounding very confusing, but in other words, every pair of headphones bought from us saves the world for an equivalent of a whole many pairs of headphones. By buying Valco noise-cancelling headphones you are compensating more than you consume.

Frankly, with that, you’ll compensate pretty much everything we have to sell. And even if our numbers are complete horse crap, you will compensate at least something. By buying enough headphones to your company, you can compensate the CEOs vacation to Pattaya. If you want, they’ll also compensate for adultery and a small penis.

No, we mean honestly, protecting their environment is not a zero-sum game. Don’t go thinking you just bought yourself a good conscience to do whatever you want. Anyways, these might be the only headphones in Finland that have been compensated in some way.

Compensation and employing an entrepreneur

We’re not going to lie and say we are doing this just because we want to be good. The goal of this greenwashing campaign is to sell new headphones, but also to do our own part in saving the world.

The more headphones we sell, the closer we are to our final goal, that is, building the Death Star on the Earth’s orbit.

As a bonus, we promise to shoot material from us planting the trees into social media. You can sit on your sofa drinking soda and listening to Boney M. with your noise-cancelling headphones and laugh, as we are in the forest getting eaten by deer flies.

How can I participate?

Buy a pair of headphones

The study: 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

1. Photo of a deer fly: Derell Licht