ZEISS Sunlens Presents Climate-Friendly Sun Lenses

Varese, Italy / Aalen, Germany | 23 February 2022 | ZEISS Vision Care

ZEISS Sunlens reaches another essential milestone within its sun lens range materials and continues on the road to responsible production along the entire value chain.

ZEISS Sunlens is the division of the ZEISS Group dedicated to the research, development, and production of prescription-free high-quality sunglass lenses to offer protection from the sun's rays as well as superior optical performance. The brand wants to extend its values of quality, trust, performance, innovation, and creativity to sunglasses producers and consumers.
Strong awareness of the environment motivated ZEISS Sunlens to develop a climate-friendly plano lens through the improvement of the production facilities and the use of renewable resources. The result is a lens that reduces carbon dioxide emissions - an improvement certified throughout the value chain by independent organizations.

Sustainable polyamide was developed by a team of ZEISS researchers from different departments who collaborated to create this exceptional product. This also represents an important contribution to the sustainability process the company is undertaking.

"The use of exclusively renewable energy in the Italian plant and in much of the production process is significantly cutting the emissions of CO2", explains Mathias Maffei, Product Innovation Manager at ZEISS Sunlens.
In the new lens production process, 39 percent of bio-based raw materials have replaced the fossil resources that were previously used in the value chain. The organic raw material itself comes from the waste produced by the agricultural and lumber industries. The carbon footprint of this lens has been reduced by 50 percent compared to a fully fossil-based manufacturing process. The new climate-friendly sun lenses maintain the features, high-quality standards, and optical performance of their previous polyamide counterparts.

ZEISS Sunlens was meticulous and wanted the entire production chain to be certified to REDcert² standards (scheme principles for the certification of sustainable material flows for the chemical industry). The mass balanced product offers a sustainable polyamide lens with verified use of bio-based material and emissions reduction. REDcert² utilizes the mass balance approach: this accounting method ensures that the sustainable bio-based raw materials are blended in upstream facilities with fossil-based raw materials. They are then allocated downstream exclusively to the production of plano sun lenses, following the principle of verified volumes in every step of the value chain. This is one of the few international sustainability certification schemes covering all stages of the value chain with uniform and harmonized criteria and therefore offering a guarantee of integrity for the sustainability attributes associated with the certified product.

ZEISS Sunlens is proud of its certification, which again proves the company's transparency and seriousness regarding a contemporary and important issue and represents added value to an already high-quality product.

“Our goal with this sustainable lens is to be 100 percent aware of the resources that are used throughout the process and what the overall impact of this lens represents from the raw material to the finished lens,” says Pietro Speroni, Head of ZEISS Sunlens. “We aren’t looking for an easy claim to be green but for a thoroughly verified and certified process which makes a difference to our environment.”

Starting from January 2022, the new ZEISS Sunlens’ sustainable polyamide will be the only polyamide produced in Italy and will completely replace the classic material.