The environment is a hot topic. Quite literally, as life for us will become far less sustainable as the earth is heating up. It will make the oceans rise, the weather far more unpredictable and volatile, accelerates desertification, and the list goes on. To turn the tide, a change is needed, fast and quite radical. While the vast majority of the watch industry underscores this, making actual changes proves to be quite challenging.

One of the most significant issues is that, in particular, high-end watches are luxury goods. As the name already implies, these are things that are (very) nice to have but by no means a necessity. Closing down production is not a solution, as this is along the line of committing collective suicide to save the environment. The best course of action is to do things differently. That is, by itself, already a momentous task because it is sometimes complicated to determine the best way to serve the environment, also because the impact of individual actions cannot be measured so easily, let alone compared.
I struggle with this in my personal life as well, and those struggles are not any different for watch manufacturers. We can debate on what the best course of action it, but I feel that the best thing is to start simply somewhere. Chopard has been a trailblazer when it comes to lowering the environmental footprint of the use of gold by using only 100% ethical gold in their manufacture, which not only focuses on the environment, but on so...