Berkeley, CA (April 22, 2024)—Meyer Sound has long had numerous sustainability and “green goals,” ranging from manufacturing practices to looking at how to best extend products’ usability. Here, the company’s Director of Loudspeaker Development, Katharine “Katie” Murphy Khulusi, explains a variety of the company’s approaches to achieving ecological objectives.
WHAT ARE MEYER SOUND’S OVERARCHING SUSTAINABILITY GOALS?
Our company sustainability goals are multifaceted. First, we’re privileged to base our facilities in Berkeley, California. Being in Berkeley comes with specific commitments to run our business in a sustainable way, particularly as a manufacturer with both a warehouse and workplace onsite. In that context the company continues to move forward, adhering to California’s Green Business guidelines, doing what we can to be good members of the community in Berkeley, and staying true to our core company values.
On the engineering side of things, we try to make sure that those sustainable values are baked into updates to our manufacturing line and into the useful life of our products, making sure that they operate as long as possible and their lifecycle extends to secondary uses.
With every new product, we’re trying to get the most out of the smallest amount of raw materials. We want to make sure that we are not over-consuming in our designs.
Another side is power consumption. We want to make sure every new product we make is more efficient than the last, so you can use less power to get better output and get higher sound output in a smaller package.
It’s about really making sure, from the very beginning of the design phase, to consider a product’s performance as an individual unit and in the context of the number of products needed to put on a tour, a festival, or a permanent install.
HOW ARE YOU INCORPORATING THESE SUSTAINABILITY GOALS INTO YOUR ENGINEERING WORK?
It’s all about holistic design. We need to be baking these sustainability values in right from the concept stage and not compromising on them. Then, what we end up with is a product that has been thoughtfully and intentionally designed from start to finish.
DOES MEYER SOUND WORK WITH SUSTAINABILITY PARTNERS?
Absolutely. Two of our biggest collaborators in the sustainability space are Sustainability in AV (SAVe) and Sound Future. SAVe helps our industry understand and achieve the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development goals, and serves as a bridge to like-minded industries, NGOs, and partners. We sponsored their March conference at UCLA, and we are really excited to continue to work with them toward meeting broader climate goals.
We are working with Sound Future, a nonprofit that uses the power of live events as a catalyst for climate innovation, to evaluate the difference we’re striving to make and how that correlates to real life. With organizations like Sound Future, we really want to be optimizing our data; then we are able to demonstrate that we aren’t just talking about this, we’re making significant, quantifiable steps in the right direction with sustainability in mind.
