We catch up with Magnus Gravem from reMarkable to chat about ethics, sustainability and how he aims to integrate this into his current work.
Who are we talking to?
Magnus Gravem, VP Sustainability in reMarkable
Is it a logical journey to what you are doing now?
Yes, from a certain point onward, my path has been clear. I always knew I wanted to work in business ethics and for a company with the potential to make a real impact. After several years as a sustainability consultant, reMarkable was the rare opportunity I’d been searching for. A Norwegian hardware company focused on helping people cut through distractions resonated with my professional ambitions and commitment to minimalism. When I fully understood the reMarkable vision of ‘better thinking’, and how sustainability could be embedded at its core, I knew this was a place where I could make a real difference.
Sustainability and ethics with Magnus Gravem, reMarkable
You began by studying religion, did you see yourself working in the field that you are now in?
When I chose my master’s thesis, I already knew I wanted to work with business ethics – at a time when dedicated sustainability programs didn’t exist, so I had to carve my own path. I found it fascinating that, across cultures, ethical principles often lead to the same outcomes even if the reasoning differs. That insight still shapes how I approach sustainability today. To succeed with sustainability, it needs to be intertwined with business, and vice versa. It has to be built in, not bolted on. What I did not know at the time, however, was that in a few years I would be working in a company defining the paper tablet category.
What are you currently working on?
Recently, much of our focus has been on the reMarkable Paper Pro Move—our most sustainable product yet. With its recent launch, we’ve taken major steps forward, pioneering the use of recycled materials, significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions, improving repairability, and ensuring superior product longevity.
The results speak for themselves: The Paper Pro Move contains 20% recycled content by weight, with key materials like the rare earths in the magnets and the cobalt in the batteries being 100% recycled, and we’ve achieved a 27% reduction in GHG emissions compared to a scenario without active improvement efforts.
With Paper Pro Move, we’ve designed for repair, refurbishment, and recycling from the ground up—supporting a circular product lifecycle. Our refurbishment program, active since 2019, gives returned devices a second life with the same warranty as new. The separate backplate makes it easy for the experts at our assembly site to replace or repair most of the internal components, like the battery or even the circuit board. We’re also expanding regional refurbishment in Asia, Europe, and the US to extend product lifespans globally. These steps ensure long-term value is built into every reMarkable device.
For us, sustainability isn’t a one-off project but an ongoing commitment, built into how we design and develop technology.
What sustainability strategies are you working on implementing at reMarkable?
At the core of our efforts is our circularity strategy, which ties together product design, new business models, and operational practices. A key part of this is our product sustainability strategy, which turns the ambitions of circularity into concrete actions in product design and development. This strategy helps us extend product lifespans, expand circular services, and make responsible material choices.
Alongside this, we’re implementing policies across our supply chain to protect human rights, secure decent working conditions, and address climate impact in a measurable way.
We take a holistic approach, including key areas such as climate, circularity, and people. Everything we do is guided by risk-, opportunity-, and impact-based assessments so that our relatively small sustainability team can deliver outsized results.
What are your targets, goals, and benchmarks to ensure you can assess if ReMarkable are actually making progress towards these goals?
We have set targets for our most material sustainability topics, with milestones to track progress along the way. While targets aren’t public yet, key indicators relate to climate emissions, circularity and waste reduction.
For products like the reMarkable Paper Pro and Paper Pro Move, we track the share of recycled materials, energy efficiency in both production and use, transportation impacts, and waste across the entire lifecycle. Since most of our footprint comes from our products and value chain, these are critical levers for real progress.
By breaking big ambitions into measurable steps, we ensure that our sustainability actions add up to real impact. These benchmarks give us a clear way to hold ourselves accountable—so we can demonstrate tangible progress, not just intent.
Transparency is key to us. We share both our progress and our challenges openly, because the tech industry has more work to do, and we believe in leading with honesty.
What else would you like to talk about?
One thing that really stands out at reMarkable is how engaged our coworkers are. They’re the first to call me out if something isn’t up to par—and just as quick to celebrate our wins. We also run open sustainability meetings where the whole company’s invited, and the levels of participation and engagement there are just amazing.
If things go well, what would ‘good’ look like for ReMarkable and you personally in 3-5 years from now?
I would say that ‘good’ for reMarkable in 3–5 years means we’ve successfully achieved the right balance between our circular and linear revenue streams. This would involve offering compelling circular products and services that have a strong commercial viability. But the success must be rooted in further reductions in our reliance on virgin materials and non-renewable inputs in our products, as well as further reductions of GHG emissions.
Since I manage sustainability at reMarkable, the success of reMarkable’s products and programs mirrors my own. In other words, I want to see an increasing reduction in virgin materials, non-renewable inputs, and GHG emissions. I also strive hard to achieve these goals, as I believe that expanding the use of recycled components and materials, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions, are essential to building the kind of future we would all like to live in.
What are your sources of information and inspiration, how do you stay up to date and informed?
I often look at what other companies are doing and try to draw inspiration from them. I also regularly connect with my network, both on LinkedIn and in person, to stay up to speed on industry trends.
The regulatory landscape is also important. Staying current with it is important because the pace of change is faster than ever. It’s crucial for me to understand those regulations as quickly as possible so I can give our organization and my team the input, direction and time to adapt and ensure our strategies and procedures align with compliance requirements.
Finally, I lean on the entire reMarkable team a lot. Because we all come at reMarkable from different perspectives, whether that’s hardware development or software development or marketing or whatever, their knowledge is an incredible source of information.
How can people learn more about you and your work?
The best place to learn more about my work as well as reMarkable’s work is the sustainability page at remarkable.com/sustainability. That’s where we share our latest initiatives and progress. Additionally, I sometimes participate in webinars and seminars, which can usually be found with a quick online search, though I don’t have anything scheduled at the moment.
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