Your Purchase Now Gives Back to the Land the Wool Came From

This week a woven rug from Cooperative Tatrout in Tounfit shipped to a customer in Summerville, South Carolina. It was the first order on Anou to run through the Atlas Wool Supply Co's carbon offset program, something we have been quietly building toward for a couple of years.

Here is how it works. When you check out on Anou, we now estimate the emissions from each leg of your order's journey: overground from the artisan's village to Fez, on to Casablanca, by air to your region, and the last stretch to your door. For Tatrout's blanket that came to 9.89 kg of CO2e, almost all of it from the flight across the Atlantic. You can pay to offset that amount on your confirmation page, and you'll receive a certificate once it is done.

What makes this different from most offset schemes is where the money goes. It does not go to a tree-planting project on another continent that you will never see. Every offset purchased on Anou funds the Atlas Wool Supply Co's solar and land regeneration work in the Aït Bouguemez valley and the surrounding mountains, the same land where the sheep that grow our wool live and graze. The carbon is avoided by running the mill on sun rather than diesel, and put back into the soil, in the exact place the rug came from.

There are many places to buy a Moroccan rug. Most of them will tell you very little about who made it, what they were paid, or where the wool came from, because they don't know. When you buy from Anou, the artisan sets the price and is paid directly. The wool is traceable to the Atlas breeds and mountains it came from. Tatrout dyes with plants rather than chemicals. And now, with the offset, the cost of getting the finished work to your home is paid back into the land those artisans and their materials depend on.

That is the loop we have been trying to close since Anou began: a purchase that supports the maker and gives back to the place the craft comes from, rather than extracting from both.

The offset is now available on every purchase on Anou, and on every visit to an artisan village, workshop, or residency booked through our experiences. If you have bought from Anou before and would like to offset a past order, email hello@theanou.com and we will take care of it.

To learn more about how the offsets are calculated and what they fund, or to offset your own flight to Morocco, visit theanou.com/materials/awsco_carbon_market_trial.

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