The most sustainable piece of tableware is the one that does not need to be replaced.

Hospitality is hard on tableware. Anfora's body and high-fire process are engineered for the realities of professional kitchens — repeated thermal cycling, the weight of full stacks, edge impact at the dish pit, and the chemical aggression of dishwasher cycles. We design with operators in mind: pieces that can take years of nightly service without losing the look they had on day one.

We also design for long catalogue lifecycles. Our shapes are built to be reordered for years — so a hotel group that standardises on an Anfora collection today can replace breakage from the same SKU half a decade from now, rather than having to redesign an entire table because the line has been discontinued. That is a sustainability decision dressed up as a commercial one, and we believe the two are not in tension.

Quality first; design that earns the right to stay on the table for a long time.

Ceramics is a material-intensive industry: caolin, clay, feldspar, alumina, quartz and water, fired with significant energy, with scrap generated at every stage. Our priority is to keep as much of that material flow inside the factory as possible.

The hardest part of the problem is vitrified scrap — pieces that have been through the kiln and, for whatever reason, do not pass quality control. Once a piece has been fired, it cannot be re-wetted and re-formed; in conventional production it leaves the site as waste for landfills.

Anfora has installed in 2026 an on-site dry-grinding facility that mills our own vitrified scrap into a fine ceramic powder, which we reincorporate into our raw-material formulas. The effect is twofold: we pull less virgin clay, feldspar and quartz into the process, and we send less material to landfill. Pieces of plates that did not pass quality control yesterday become part of plates going through the kiln tomorrow.

We are continuing to work, with our raw-material suppliers and our own technical team, on:

• Increasing the share of recovered material we can incorporate without compromising the technical performance our customers rely on.
• Capturing a higher share of pre-fired ("green") scrap and reincorporating it directly into the body.
• Qualifying lower-carbon mineral inputs from suppliers who can document their own sourcing.

Firing ceramics needs heat, and heat needs energy. Our priorities are to use less of it, and to clean up what we use.

• On-site solar. We have installed a rooftop solar photovoltaic array on the Hidalgo factory. It supplies a portion of our electricity directly from the roof of the building that uses it; the remainder of our electrical demand we continue to draw from the grid as Mexico's grid mix evolves.
• Kiln and process efficiency. We continue to invest in kiln controls, insulation, scheduling and heat-recovery measures aimed at reducing the energy required per piece fired. Energy is one of our largest operating costs as well as our largest environmental impact — the incentives to keep working at this are aligned.
• Natural gas for firing. Our kilns run on natural gas, the standard fuel for high-fire ceramic production. We are tracking developments in lower-carbon firing — including kiln electrification, hydrogen blending and carbon capture — and we will adopt what becomes commercially and technically credible at our scale.

We have not yet completed a full greenhouse-gas inventory. We are working towards a baseline aligned with the GHG Protocol (Scope 1, 2 and material Scope 3 categories) and will publish that baseline, with a reduction trajectory, once it has been independently reviewed.

Hidalgo is where Anfora is from. Almost 1,000 people make Anfora products — operators, technicians, artisans, designers, supervisors — and come mostly from the communities around our factory. The most concrete thing we can say about sustainability at Anfora is what kind of workplace we are for them.

Anfora hires for capability, not for appearance. More than 30 of our colleagues are persons with disabilities — including colleagues who are blind, colleagues with limb differences, and colleagues with other physical conditions that, in much of the labour market, would have meant being passed over. They work across our production and operational areas, with the workplace adaptations and access support that let them do their jobs as well as anyone else.

This commitment has been recognised twice at national level by Mexico's federal Ministry of Labour and Social Welfare (Secretaría del Trabajo y Previsión Social), which has awarded Anfora the Distintivo Empresa Incluyente "Gilberto Rincón Gallardo" — the federal distinction for workplaces that demonstrate genuine inclusion of persons in situations of vulnerability, including persons with disabilities. The distinction is named after the founding president of Mexico's National Council to Prevent Discrimination (CONAPRED).

Approximately 70% of Anfora's employees are women — a proportion that is unusual in heavy manufacturing, and one we are proud of. It is not the result of a campaign. It is the result of decades of hiring without prejudice and of building a workplace where women want to stay.

Sustaining that workforce means maintaining the conditions that make it possible: clear and enforced policies for the prevention of workplace violence, sexual harassment and discrimination, in documented compliance with the regulations of Mexico's Ministry of Labour and Social Welfare — including NOM-035-STPS on psychosocial risk at work; confidential reporting channels with documented investigation and response procedures; and equal-opportunity practices in hiring, promotion, training and pay.

Beyond who we employ, sustainability is also a question of who we work with over time. We aim for long-term relationships with local suppliers and partners, in preference to opportunistic sourcing, where commercially viable. We invest in apprenticeship and technical training for the operators, technicians and artisans who actually make Anfora products. We hold ourselves and our on-site contractors to the same workplace standards.

These are commitments that pre-date the sustainability vocabulary they now sit inside. They are how Anfora has been run.

Sustainability claims have become a serious area of regulatory and customer scrutiny, and rightly so. We deliberately do not describe Anfora as "carbon neutral," "net zero," "climate positive," "100% sustainable" or any similar headline label. Those terms are easy to write and very hard to substantiate, and we would rather be specific about what we are doing than reach for a label we cannot defend.

Where we are today is this:

• Our labour, health-and-safety, ethics and operational practices are externally audited on an ongoing basis by Bureau Veritas and SGS for our major customers. They have been for years.
• We have installed real equipment — solar, dry-grinding, water treatment — that is doing real work in our factory every day.
• We have not yet completed a formal greenhouse-gas inventory under the GHG Protocol, and we do not yet publish quantitative environmental KPIs. That is the specific gap we are closing next.

We would rather earn our customers' trust by being specific and incremental than lose it by being grandiose. If you are looking for a supplier whose sustainability narrative outpaces its operations, Anfora is not it. If you are looking for a supplier that is doing the unglamorous work of making real changes inside a real factory, talk to us.