Is the Price Right?

Do music instrument manufacturers sacrifice quality and profits by going green? This is a two-pronged question that is becoming imperative as more and more companies seek to become environmentally friendly with the products that they make and sell – especially now that recyclable and reusable materials are more commonplace.

"It does seem like the industry is making a push towards the green movement, which we think is great," says Trevor Franchi, operations manager for Ernie Ball's guitar and bass division, Music Man. "We have a few direct competitors who have launched significant marketing campaigns highlighting some of their efforts." He offers two reasons why a green choice is not always logical for business: It is cost prohibitive and, as far as raw materials, one generally pays more for recycled materials and sustainably harvested woods.

"The other main reason is we have found no substitute for the tonal characteristics that we are looking for, yet," admits Franchi. "One of our mantras here at Ernie Ball/Music Man is 'We make tools for artists.' Sacrificing quality is not an option. This is probably the biggest hurdle for eco-friendly options in our industry." He adds that a more immediate eco-friendly option "is to focus on sustainable harvesting practices by some of our suppliers and re-purposing as much scrap as possible."

"I think the biggest issue is materials from environmentally sustainable resources," concurs Emmanuel Tonnelier, general manager of reed and mouthpiece manufacturer Vandoren. "For us, we grow most of our cane and so it’s easy for us to say, but for clarinets, guitars, pianos, and other natural-based products, I think this will be the biggest challenge."

Customers are also a part of the environmental equation. Brian Vance, director of product management for D'Addario, says that his company has done some research into consumers' environmental consciousness. While he notes that in most cases they will probably focus on features, brand, or price, for some the green side is a selling point. "It's not like we're saving a ton of money by being environmentally conscious – a lot of times it costs more money to do that – but it is about aligning yourself with the sentiment and the spirit of your customer," says Vance. "Being environmentally responsible doesn't hurt anybody."

Vance observes that some of their competitors have gone the opposite way, such as with packaging that resembles potato chip bags. "That stuff is not recyclable at your municipal recycling," he says. "In some cases, there is no way to recycle it because they're laminating different types of foil together, and once you laminate two materials like that together you generally can't recycle it. That's creating a lot of garbage that our industry is putting out there, and we're trying to work around that. We've got a couple other recycling programs that are coming by the end of the year, even to take it to another level on the string side."

Shaun Lee, chief product officer for Bohemian Guitars sees change in the wind, even though he believes "the industry is pretty antiquated, overall. You're coming across some brands now that are trying to use old-growth woods and reclaimed woods, which is nice to see. For the most part, though, I think there's still this overarching idea that you have to have these expensive toned woods, and that you can't use reclaimed or upcycled products to get a quality instrument. I think we're proving that's not the case." His brother Adam, the company's co-founder/CEO, sees a new take on traditional materials like carbon fiber and 3-D printing and more openness to playing traditional with guitar design.

“We've figured out how we can use as many reclaimed and upcycled products as possible and still maintain a competitive price, which is quite a hefty amount below the market average," says Shaun Lee. "If you're smart about it, take your time, and really try to make it work, there are always creative ways to keep your price points sound, so that everybody can afford your product."

That sounds like the key to a greener future for the industry.

For the 2015 installment of our annual “Green Issue,” MMR spoke with just a few of the growing number of MI suppliers who are embracing environmentally sound business practices.

Tycoon Percussion

According to Ivy Yu, general manager of Tycoon Percussion, the Siam Oak wood that makes up 80-90 percent of their drums is sustainably harvested from plantations in Thailand. "All of these are very carefully controlled forests," she explains. "There is no deforestation anywhere. With our cajones, we do experiment a little bit with different types of exotic woods, but even with those we do make sure that they do come from environmentally controlled forests."

The Thailand-based Tycoon, which has a California office, has its own factory, which allows them to oversee recycling and reuse of their materials. According to Yu, the sawdust generated from drum creation is gathered daily, taken to processing mills, and turned into fuel for textile factories in Thailand. Leftover rawhide pieces from drumheads are given to manufacturing plants for dog toys. Their biggest leftover, plywood, is used to produce small instruments like shakers that are donated to Thai schools with impoverished children.

"Every time something happens in the factory where we think it's not being utilized in the best way that it can be, we will sit down and talk about different ways to be smarter about sustainability," explains Yu. "Every little thing that happens in our factory we take into consideration, so all the wood, all the skin heads, all the sawdust, everything is already being shipped off somewhere else or being renewed somehow. When we first started using exotic woods in the cajones, that was a big worry for us because you want to be different and want to be unique in the market and give people the chance to play [with] different sounds and different looks, but not at the price of the values that we've held for so long. We make sure that wherever we source the cajones that they come from super environmentally controlled forests. We would never cause deforestation anywhere in the world."

Bohemian Guitars

Since launching their products with a Kickstarter campaign in January 2013, Bohemian Guitars are already available at Urban Outfitters and are coming to Sam Ash. Brothers Adam and Shaun Lee, co-founder/CEO and chief product officer respectively, offer a newer spin on traditional instruments by building guitars out of oil and shell cans, an idea inspired by street musicians in their hometown of Johannesburg making striking instruments out of trash.

"We realized that in the process of making these guitars out of oil cans that it actually produces a really rich sound, so using reclaimed materials – whether it's woods or oil cans – is really important to everything we do," states Adam. "We've also started doing a lot of manufacturing where we are melting down scrap metals and forming our own bodies now, and the goal is to have bodies formed out of 100 percent reclaimed metal. The processes aren't necessarily in place right now, but we are doing our best to use as much as possible."

The company has made mandolins, basses, and ukuleles on a custom level, and they hope to expand those product lines this year. They also hope to release "everything from guitar straps made out of seatbelts to hopefully an amplifier of some kind with a metal body made out of recycled metals or a guitar with a Bluetooth amp built into it," says Shaun.

"Later this year, we're going to be launching an electric lunchbox ukulele, which is modeled after those metal lunch boxes," adds Adam. "It's going to have a built-in amplifier with eight hours of rechargeable battery life. That's something that we'll be launching on Indiegogo. It's really an instrument for someone who is on the go. It's very rugged, versatile, lightweight, and easy to transport."

Adam is based in San Francisco, while Shaun is overseeing their Atlanta facility, where they plan to build necks and internal structures from scratch using reclaimed woods, "hopefully with some sort of story behind them, whether it's Civil War related or whatever," explains Shaun. "We'd love to start doing that. Then going to get back into the vintage cans, those old Castrol and Shell cans. We also want to develop a program where people send us their old instruments, and we use those parts and upcycle them and reclaim them for our own instruments, then give them some sort of a store credit."

The company plants trees for every guitar they sell to subsidize their use of new materials and have partnered with Trees For The Future, which plants trees in developing communities in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, allowing for residents to live off them and make a living off of them. Bohemian Guitars wants to increase such initiatives throughout the year.

MJC Ironworks

Mike Connolly's three-year old guitar string company is "definitely green all the way," he declares. "We're the only company that has tins. We don't use envelopes at all. We just use little paper tags to identify the strings. It turns back into dirt. You're not going to get away from the properties of ink. Some people use vegetable oil, if you can afford that kind of stuff. Tin is metal. There's nothing in there that isn't going to turn back into dirt."

RNPROTECTS is a system that MJC Ironworks uses to protect its strings. "I have a treatment in there that's a naturally occurring anti-corrosion inhibitor that emits a vapor that is charged by a static charge," explains Connolly. "I can put this tin and tape it to the side of a ship and ship it back and forth to Europe to where you couldn't even recognize the outside of it, and you could open it up and [the strings] will be as fresh as the day they were made. There are other companies that use bags and things like that, but I don't know how that stuff breaks down environmentally."

MJC Ironworks' next product in the RNPROTECTS line – which in the future should include other instruments like horns and keyboards and anything electronic like amps and mixers – a 1" x 1" square that musicians can toss in their instrument cases. "So you take your bass out, play it, and it wears off, and as soon as you put it back in the case and close the case, a static charge occurs and that vapor sticks to everything metal," states Connolly. "It'll even permeate the pots. They use this stuff in government computers and space shuttles. They use it in thicker compounds to coat the strands of suspension bridges for its anti-corrosion properties. This little foam piece will last up to two years."

D'Addario: Fretted and ProMark

Whether through their string, percussion, or woodwinds brands, Jim D'Addario and his company steadfastly remain green friendly. For over two decades, his company has sought to improve their packaging and be environmentally conscious. Back in the '90s, "strings were packaged in clear PVC pouches with a little fold over insert, and inside there you had six individual pieces of paper where all the strings fit in," recalls Brian Vance, director of product management for D'Addario. "You had eight pieces of packaging in there."

Inspired by companies packaging products without the PVC pouch, and the color ball end idea from a string company called Nashville Straits that they used to supply, D'Addario Fretted has gradually moved even the most rigid consumers (often through discounted pricing) from the old packaging to their newer packaging, which is a Vapor Corrosion Inhibitor (VCI) bag made of recyclable plastic. The packaging emits rust-inhibiting vapor molecules to protect strings from oxidation.

"A lot of the bluegrass instruments like banjo and oud have bends instead of ball ends and we never really had a way to identify the strings, but by the end of this year we will be 100 percent environmental friendly," says Vance. "We've been at about 80 to 90 percent with all of the environmental packages."

Vance says D'Addario wants to bring more awareness of the impact that printing 11 million sets of strings a year can have on the environment. He notes that while many of his industry counterparts are more socially conscious, others are going the other way, especially in manufacturing via China. His company's Planet Waves accessory arm stopped making unrecyclable blister packs years ago and has now "migrated to a blister card with just some plastic straps that hold the product in. We can't do that with every product, but with everything we can we're trying return to eliminate any plastic component in the packaging."

Two-thirds of Planet Waves accessories are made in America, which gives the company more control. "We don't do any more clamshells and nothing in a blister pack except for a few things that are in a heat-sealed blister on a card," says Vance. "Another thing we're getting into now is all the recycled materials and repurposed materials that you can use for packaging."

On the ProMark side, D'Addario's drumstick division has started a program called, “Play. Plant. Preserve.,” whereby they plant five trees for every one they use for making drumsticks, which adds up to an abundance trees. "Making drumsticks is super inefficient in that we can only use about 15 percent of the tree," explains Nick Gordon, percussion product manager for D'Addario. "We're the only one in the industry that has their own sawmill – we're able to completely utilize the entire tree and sell off the rest of the tree to furniture companies, to garden stores for bark, and essentially use every single piece of it, which is amazing. Play. Plant. Preserve. is a major initiative where we work with the Tennessee Board of Agriculture – that's where our sawmill is located and where all the hickory trees are – and they basically target farms that are locationally appropriate for hickory and hardwood trees. They help us find the farms, we buy the seedlings, and those seedlings are made available for free to all the farms that plant hickory. It's been a really successful program and a prototype that the Tennessee Board of Agricultural is working on extending to other industries."

Gordon adds that ProMark is the only drumstick company he knows of that is doing reforestation and the only company that owns a sawmill. "Having our own sawmill gives us the opportunity to extend our environmental practices all the way to the very beginning of the supply chain," he observes. The company is building a second sawmill from the ground up that will be double the size of its current one. "In doing so it will have even less waste. As far as I know, we're doing the best of all of our competitors."

Music Man/Ernie Ball

"For the past four or five years Music Man/Ernie Ball has made huge strides towards energy conservation," says Trevor Franchi, the company's manufacturing operations analyst. "Since 2010, we've reduced usage by almost 35 percent. There are two sides to this movement. One is selfish. Going green does cost some money upfront, but in the long run it saves money. The other is doing the right thing by the environment."

California's notorious rolling blackouts were one of the factors inspiring changes at the instrument manufacturer, including replacing most of their lighting with LED or high efficiency fixtures. "We've modified and/or replaced some of our existing manufacturing equipment to be more energy wise," says Franchi. "We've diverted as many operations as possible to the off-hours when energy consumption is less taxing on the utility provider. This has been done through automation and crafty scheduling. These projects are awesome, challenging, and extremely rewarding. Because of the focus on energy, we now manufacture our products more intelligently than we did in the past. The environment and our bottom line both benefit from this."

Droughts are another major California concern, and Music Man has replaced some of their existing faucets and installed waterless urinals. Franchi estimates they have reduced over 400 gallons per production day.

Music Man/Ernie Ball has changed many of their packaging to recycled paper, and their engineering team regularly experiments with eco-friendly wood options. "In the instrument world there are only so many woods that give us the right tonal qualities," says Franchi. "Wood chips are donated to local nurseries to use, and end cuts are donated to schools and other local manufacturers. When painting, VOCs [volatile organic compounds] are a concern. In the past five years, we've reduced our VOCs per instrument by over 30 percent. This has been done by material changes and more intelligent manufacturing processes. Automation has allowed us to have more control of our processes, gaining better transfer efficiency which equates to less material usage. Another example of a win for us and a win for the environment."

The company is close to installing a solar energy system that will offset 95 percent of its energy consumption. "We are constantly experimenting with finishes and woods that are eco-friendly and will continue to do so even after we find the perfect combination," adds Franchi. "We are dealing more and more with wood suppliers who practice sustainable harvesting practices. A lot of these measures do not make sense with a short-term vision. The cost to implement is prohibitive and the environmental impact is not as tangible as most people want. But long term, we know it's necessary and if nothing else, it's the right thing to do."

Vandoren

In creating its woodwind and brass reeds, mouthpieces, and accessories, French company Vandoren uses cane that is a 100 percent natural plant, according to general manager Emmanuel Tonnelier. They harvest all their own cane in the Mediterranean basin, but not all of it is cultivated; some of it is wild cane. "We use no fertilizer or pesticide during its growth and no chemical components during its transformation into reeds," he says. "Any leftover cane resulting from reed manufacturing is completely reused as either compost in our plantations or fuel for the boiler that heats our factory."

Tonnelier states that no other energy source is necessary for heating. The company's high performance boiler was installed in 2006 and only gives off water vapor and CO2 into the atmosphere. He stresses that because the CO2 exhaust is of plant not fossil origin that it does contribute to the greenhouse effect. "The quantity evacuated during combustion is, in fact, completely compensated for by the quantity of atmospheric CO2 absorbed by the plant during its two-year growth," explains Tonnelier.

Vandoren is very concerned with environmentally friendly packaging. Their reed protector is made from 100 percent recyclable polypropylene and bears the triangular PP5 mark. "The Flow-Pack we use is a recoverable packaging in the form of energy recovery – the film has a high calorific ratio in incineration," explains Tonnelier. "The choice of our supplier was determined not only by their ability to meet our technical demands linked to Flow Pack performance in protecting the reed, but also with a regard for ecological considerations. The supplier of the film is an ISO 14001 certified company concerned with environmental management. Our cellophane on the outside of the box is of a very common type made from polypropylene. The thickness of the film we use effectively limits waste volume in comparison with other packaging solutions like airtight boxes, tubs, or other procedures for maintaining hygrometry."