We did not want to stop at our own gate

"We clean air for a living. It started to feel strange that it stopped at our own gate."

Annupurna Maam, thirty seconds, shot on a phone at the planting site.

We asked her to explain why a filtration company runs a plantation programme, and she got to the thing that most corporate environmental programmes carefully avoid saying out loud. The number worth publishing is not the number of trees planted. It is the number still alive a year later, and that number is always smaller.

Everything IFF makes works inside somebody else's factory. A filter bag we produced at Indore is catching dust right now in a plant none of us will ever visit. That contribution is completely real and completely invisible, and it ends on the day the purchase order ends. Green Legacy exists because we wanted something that carried on after that.

We have been asked more than once why a company that makes filter bags has any business planting trees, and the honest answer is that it took us a while to work out how to say it properly. The version in this video is the one that finally made sense to us. Our products remove particulate from a gas stream inside somebody else's factory. A tree removes particulate from the open air, and keeps doing it for a century. It is the same job at a very different scale, and once you see it that way the question stops being why and starts being why it took us forty years.

There is no script being read here and no second take dressed up as a first. Thirty seconds, one phone, at the site.

greenlegacy@iffgroup.com

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