Corporate social responsibility

Throughout our history, as a company and as individual employees, we have dedicated our time, talents, and resources to organizations and programs that make a positive difference in the lives of others.


Corporate social responsibility

We are committed to improving the lives of our employees, customers, patients, stakeholders, and the communities in which we live and work. Conducting our business ethically, responsibly, and transparently is the right thing to do, allows us and others to hold us accountable, and, in the long run, generates pride and commitment from our employees and creates value for all our stakeholders.

Align is committed to enhancing our Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) disclosures over time. As we move forward, we will continue to align our ESG communications with our corporate objectives and to demonstrate the relationship between our ESG disclosures and our strategy and purpose.

 

Philanthropy

One of the many things that makes Align a great place to work is the concern our employees have for the world around us and our commitment to helping others. As a company and as individual employees, we have dedicated our time, talents, and resources to organizations and programs that make positive differences in the lives of others. Our philanthropic philosophy is to support organizations whose visions tie closely to our own - improving smiles, supporting, and educating youth/teens, and empowering our customers through partnerships with learning institutions and foundations. Globally, we provide opportunities for and actively encourage employees to support local charities through volunteerism, team building, and donation programs. We are extremely proud of our corporate commitment to philanthropic work and are equally proud of the generosity and dedication of our employees. This passion is core to our purpose of transforming smiles and changing lives, and in times of need, how we support our employees, customers, and communities is more important than ever before.   Launched in 2020, the Align Foundation provides a structured means by which significant donations are directed from a donor-advised fund overseen by Fidelity Charitable, with the flexibility to provide smaller monetary donations, processes to donate our products, as well as an organized way to involve our employees in giving activities. Since the donor advised fund inception in 2020, we have granted almost $3 million to non-profits and NGOs around the world.

Globally, we provide opportunities for and actively encourage employees to support local charities through volunteerism, team building, and donation programs and are extremely proud of our corporate commitment to philanthropic work and are equally proud of the generosity and dedication of our employees.



Our partnership with Benevity, a corporate purpose platform, continues to transform our workplace, culture, and the communities where we live and work. It is a platform, internally called impact@align, where employees can find ways to make a difference through volunteer activities, donation opportunities, charitable education, ad hoc matching programs, and volunteer rewards.


We held our 6th annual Month of Smiles in October 2023, where each of our more than 22,000 employees are encouraged to participate and make a positive difference through volunteerism, charitable donations, fundraising activities, and intentional acts of goodness. Although the Month of Smiles happens in October, the giving continues through the rest of the year and we are continuously amazed with the participation by and impact of our employees.


In addition to our employee month of service, there are several organizations and programs we support:

Operation Smile

Since 2013, we have been a proud supporter of Operation Smile, a global medical nonprofit providing hundreds of thousands of free surgeries for people born with cleft lips and cleft palates in low and middle-income countries. For the third year, we sponsored Operation Smile’s International Student Leadership Conference, a powerful opportunity for high schoolers around the world to change lives and change their own. As part of our sponsorship, we provided scholarships for 24 participants from 8 different countries plus an additional 10 scholarships for students personally impacted with a cleft condition. As of December 31, 2023, we had donated approximately $2.7 million to Operation Smile including a donation of $1 million to Operation Smile in honor of our 10 million Invisalign smiles milestone. In recognition of our support, Align received Operation Smile's Corporate Humanitarian Award. “We are so appreciative of the dedication and support from Align Technology over the years and are excited for what we can do to bring families renewed hope and help children around the world smile even more as a result of this latest donation,” said Kristie Magee Porcaro, chief strategy officer, Operation Smile. “Together, we’re improving the health of many children and ensuring that they have the opportunity for a better future.”

Experience the 2023 International Student Leadership Conference here:

America’s ToothFairy

For 16 years we have supported America’s ToothFairy, an organization with a mission to increase access to oral health care and education for underserved children in the United States by supporting nonprofit clinics and community partners. As of December 31, 2023, we have provided almost $2 million for the foundation’s operational expenses and children’s oral health programs. With our support in 2023, more than 1.3 million children living with restricted access to care in communities across the country received dental care and/or oral health instruction through America’s ToothFairy programs and the safety-net dental clinics they support, a 54% increase over the prior year.


We are proud to support an organization that is helping families in underserved communities learn about oral health and the best ways to maintain a healthy smile,” said Align’s Vice President of Philanthropy, Inclusion, and Wellness and America’s ToothFairy Board Secretary, Julie Paulsen. “We are delighted to sponsor the HERO Program and support the efforts of America’s ToothFairy, whose vision is closely tied to Align’s purpose – to transform smiles and change lives.” You can find more about America’s ToothFairy here .


Cristo Rey San José High School

Align has partnered with Cristo Rey San José High School since 2017 through their corporate work study program and mentoring programs. This provides a diverse workforce of students who receive valuable work skills, confidence, and professional role models.


Junior Achievement (JA)
In honor of Align's 25th Anniversary in 2022, the company donated $250,000 to support the important work that JA (Junior Achievement) Worldwide does to prepare young people for work and career readiness while developing critical life skills. As the world’s largest youth-serving NGO, JA Worldwide prepares young people for employment and entrepreneurship through hands on, experiential learning. They create pathways for employability, job creation, and financial success and each year, their network of over 500,000 volunteers and teachers serves more than 10 million students in over 100 countries. We have held several volunteer opportunities with JA including sponsorship and volunteering at annual JA SHE LEADS STEM summits and hosting a STEM summit in 2022 and in 2023 held the first artificial intelligence career summit for high school students at our Innovation Center in San Jose, California. Our support of JA globally and in sites such as San Jose culminated in a nomination for induction into Junior Achievement’s Business Hall of Fame.

In 2023, Align was recognized by JA NorCal. "We are proud to share that Align Technology was honored as the Technology Partner of the Year at the 2023 Junior Achievement of Northern California (@janorcal), Business Hall of Fame and Julie Paulsen, vice president, Philanthropy, Inclusion, and Wellness at Align was nominated as a 2023 “Junior Achievement of Northern California Volunteer of the Year.”

Throughout the year, Align hosts mentoring and educational opportunities for students, including a science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) career summit to encourage interest in future careers and support JA’s mission to empower students toward economic success.

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We have also established programs to support our doctors that treat patients who may not be well-suited for wearing and managing fixed appliances due to health issues, allergies, disabilities or specific health disorders through discounted fees and other support. In both Canada and the United States, Invisalign® product donation programs bring smiles to young individuals. Through Align’s Acts of Random Kindness (ARK) program, Invisalign-trained doctors collaborate to provide a straight smile to young patients dealing with health conditions. Since 2019, Align has extended a helping hand to over 200 patients by waiving the lab fees for their treatments through the ARK program.

In 2023, Align established programs with non-profit organizations that offer an affordable option for families who cannot bear the full cost of teeth straightening treatment for their children. As part of this program, with Smiles Change Lives and Smile for a Lifetime, Align waives lab fees and enables treatments through Invisalign-trained doctors who donate their time, skills, and practice resources.


Philanthropy Highlight- United Way Chihuahua

Employees at our site in Juarez, Mexico which represents our largest aggregate employee population, have a longstanding partnership with United Way Chihuahua, an organization that advocates for the health, education, and financial stability of every person in every community. Through our site’s voluntary payroll deduction program, our Juarez employees generously contributed over $85,000 USD to support United Way Chihuahua. Beyond monetary contributions, Juarez employees engaged in numerous volunteer events with United Way which served as avenues for employees to directly engage with the community, fostering meaningful connections and making tangible differences in the lives of those in need.

Inclusion

“At Align, we provide a vibrant employee experience that encourages inclusion and diversity, supports health and wellness, and inspires and develops personal and professional growth” - Stuart Hockridge, executive vice president, Human Resources

We welcome differences as opportunities for learning, overcoming challenges and thinking creatively. We serve customers and patients in over 100 countries, making inclusion, diversity and belonging essential for our growth. We are committed to building a workforce of diverse cultural backgrounds and life experiences through fair and balanced policies and practices. We were recognized in Newsweek’s list of America’s Greatest Workplaces for Diversity in 2024.

A variety of employee resources and standards embody our commitment to inclusion and diversity, including our employee resource groups that focus on the professional development, recruitment, and cultural awareness of underrepresented groups. Our employee resource groups (ERGs) are based on shared characteristics or life experiences and are open to all employees, including those who do not directly identify with other members but are passionate in supporting the group’s members in creating an educated, supportive, and inclusive culture.

At Align, we are fortunate to have a smart, diverse, and agile global team of employees. It’s imperative that we provide a vibrant employee experience and value our employees’ collective voices. We encourage active listening and development of healthy and respectful relationships in which employees can openly and honestly express their thoughts, opinions, hopes and concerns for the betterment of the organization and all its stakeholders. We value our employees’ collective voices and as a result utilize a continuous employee listening strategy that includes globally managed pulse surveys, employee lifecycle surveys, and a self-service feature to support listening efforts for our global employees have a continuous listening strategy. We leverage survey results and comments to seek ways to make positive changes throughout the organization.

Align’s core values of agility, customer, and accountability are more than words to work by, they are words we live by. The actions we take every day speak to who we are as a company and our focus on being truly impactful. We celebrate our differences, and the many ways we support one another— ultimately creating a more inclusive organization and world as we continue transforming smiles and changing lives.

Inclusion Highlight- Women in Leadership

Our leadership programs and global women@align chapters offer and encourage networking, professional development, leadership mentoring, and educational projects. The intent is to attract, develop, and retain talented women while engaging all employees. As part of our commitment, we have initiated programs and dedicated resources aimed at recruiting, monitoring, and enhancing programs designed to achieve our goals.

Awards and recognitions


We have received numerous awards for our positive work environment and culture. Some of the certifications, awards and recognitions recognized or received in 2023 and 2024 include:

  • U.S. News & World Report - Best Companies to Work For and Best Companies to Work For in the Health Care Industry
  • Forbes - World’s Best Employers
  • Great Places to Work and Best Places to Work based on our employee-validated great workplaces in the following countries, Australia, Brazil, China, Costa Rica, Germany, India, Italy, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, UK, Vietnam and United States (Raleigh, North Carolina)
  • Best Places to Work for Women in Korea
  • Computerworld - Best Place to Work in IT, based on its survey of organizations across the U.S. to identify those that provide the best benefits and amenities for IT professionals
  • Dun & Bradstreet - Top Tech Companies to Work for in Israel
  • LinkedIn - Top Companies to Grow Your Career in Israel and Poland
  • Mercer - Outstanding Women Care Award in China

Health and Wellness


We offer a wide variety of robust programs and initiatives designed to promote the overall health and welfare of all our employees and their families. Every year, we have a month dedicated to well-being, called Month of Wellness. Throughout the Month of Wellness, employees participate in a variety of activities such as informational sessions and health fairs and receive useful resources aligned to our wellness pillars - mental resilience, physical well-being and healthy living, social/family connections, and financial wellness. This provides our employees with a variety of meaningful ways to embrace wellness and well-being including mindfulness, meditation, nutrition and mental wellness activities, exercise, hikes, yoga, volunteer activities, financial education sessions, social events, and stress management.

We have implemented extensive training programs focused on keeping our employees safe while on our premises and while working remotely.

We offer compensation that is competitive in our industry so employees can feel financially secure and can in turn contribute to the well-being of their families and the economies and communities in which they live.

Health and Safety

We prioritize the health, safety and well-being of our employees and their families. Our objective is to prevent injuries and occupational illnesses by creating and maintaining environments that are safe. We offer a wide variety of robust programs and initiatives designed to promote the overall health and welfare of all our employees and their families. In addition to the compensation and benefits listed above, we offer family support services, healthcare initiatives and career services support, among many others. In addition, we have comprehensive health and safety programs established to protect our employees. For instance, we have training programs and courses that employees exposed to particular risks are required to take and update periodically. Examples include hazardous material training, emergency response and evacuation training, ergonomics training, biohazard and personal protective equipment training, and, more recently, COVID-19 related safety training.

We have an Environmental Health, Safety and Sustainability Director who is responsible for ensuring health and safety programs are maintained and effective at each of our locations. Major worksites, such as our aligner fabrication sites, and large offices have dedicated Environmental Health and Safety (“EHS”) teams that ensure health and safety programs are maintained while contributing Best Management Practices (“BMP”) and general input to corporate-wide programs. Each EHS department is responsible for ensuring all employees at their location are properly trained on various EHS topics and at the appropriate frequencies. A training suite is determined for each employee depending on their responsibilities and function modeled off ISO 45001:2018.

Align Technology, Inc. Materials and Testing FAQs

Sustainability and the Environment

Our purpose is to transform smiles and change lives. We understand that as an organization our impact is not limited to the improvement of patient health through medically supervised use of a prescription medical device. How we interact with the environment, our employees, customers, patients, suppliers, stockholders and communities is fundamental to our purpose.

We are committed to environmental protection and continuous improvement of all environmental aspects related to our supply-chain, processes, and services. To help us achieve these commitments, we look to integrate sustainability into our business operations and products in ways that help manage our environmental impact, mitigate risk, reduce costs, and increase stockholder value.

  • EMS. We have implemented an environmental management system (EMS) at all of our large manufacturing locations. The system is modeled after the ISO 14001:2015 standard and managed by our Environmental, Health and Safety (EHS) staff.
  • Renewable Energy. We have increased investments in onsite photovoltaic solar (PV) systems, with new or enlarged installations at five locations and more scheduled for 2024. We have entered into agreements to procure renewable electricity for portions of our operations, for example, in San Jose, California, the electricity not provided by the onsite PV Systems (grid) is 100% renewable-sourced. We have also secured renewable energy credits for our Ziyang and Wroclaw factories. The purchase of renewable energy credits for our Ziyang factory reduced the site’s Scope 2 emissions to zero for 2022 and 2023.
  • Smart Building. We have brought operations closer to our customers, including the ramp-up of our factory Wroclaw, . Thesite was designed to be sustainability efficient and help reduce the costs and impact of transporting raw materials to our facilities and shipping costs to our customers. The site along with having a PV System and purchasing renewable energy credits, is also LEED-Gold certified (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design). Our Istanbul. Turkey office, is also certified as a LEED Gold green building.
  • Water Conservation. conserve of water is a priority, including outfitting most of our facilities with low-flow toilets and faucet sensors, recycling water for vegetation and grey water use and installing catch basins to collect and use rainwater for operations at our manufacturing location in Juarez, Mexico. Since 2021 our large sites collectively have reduced the amount of water they consume while increasing the amount being recycled.
  • Waste management. We are passionate about minimizing the impact of plastic waste on the environment and we are pleased to share information about Align’s investment in and progress toward minimizing the impact of Invisalign therapy on the environment.
  • The Invisalign system is a prescription medical device. Both the medical device and its packaging are regulated by health agencies around the world. Invisalign aligners and their packaging undergo rigorous testing ranging from biocompatibility, bioburden, strength and performance testing. Changes to the device and its packaging must be done in a controlled manner and approved by health agencies around the globe. These changes must not degrade the high quality of the product or its 26-year history of excellent orthodontic outcomes.
  • Align has been engaged in activities to minimize our impact on the environment for many years and we are committed to continued progress. We have programs to recycle plastics, reduce product packaging, decrease waste and emissions.. We have also opened new manufacturing facilities that are closer to our customers which helps us decrease carbon emitting activities from shipping products globally.
  • Our proprietary aligner material is a multilayer polymer designed to move teeth predictability and consistently using force systems and biomechanics. The material properties add to the complexity of recycling. The polymer or plastic used in our aligners is medical grade plastic, and once the aligners have been worn by patients, they can’t be recycled like household plastic. However, the amount of polymer in the actual aligner is in fact small compared to the amount needed to produce its mold.
  • At the production level, the scrap and waste generated by our manufacturing processes does not go into landfill. The production scrap and waste from our facilities in Mexico and Poland is used for energy recovery for third parties. In China, we are repurposing 100% of the production scrap and waste for reuse in floor tiles or general recycling.
  • Since 2016, we have reduced the amount of polymer content used in our aligners by almost 50% and reduced the amount of resin used in our aligner molding by 33%. We are focused on continuous improvement and expect to make further reductions over time.
  • Reducing the environmental impact of used and unused clear aligners is also a crucial aspect of sustainability and therefore we are continually exploring recycling options as well as ways to properly dispose of plastic waste, ensuring it is correctly sorted and recycled whenever possible.
  • In 2020, we began piloting an aligner recycling program with limited number of doctors in the U.S. and Brazil. The aligner recycling program encourages customers and their patients to return used and unused aligners which are recycled in partnership with TerraCycle®, an innovative recycling company that has become a global leader in recycling hard-to-recycle materials. We continue to monitor the program results and participation and are evaluating additional options, including the EMEA and APAC regions.
  • Further, we continue to invest significantly in new technologies, materials, and ways of working that can minimize the environmental impact of plastic and/or reduce our carbon footprint. We support innovations in recycling and waste management processes, and we are redesigning our packaging materials to decrease the impact of the materials used in the packaging and shipment of our products.
  • Direct Fab, or the ability to 3D-print an aligner directly without a mold, is on the horizon. We believe our digital technology and innovation in 3D printing and “direct fab” will have a significant impact on minimizing scrap and waste from our manufacturing process.
  • We are also helping doctors to operate more sustainably by reducing the need for traditional polyvinyl-siloxane (“PVS”) impressions and the mining of the materials used to make those impressions. The use of our iTero™ intraoral scanner, rather than taking a physical impression of a patient’s teeth, removes the need for physical models to be produced, eliminating emissions associated with traditional manufacturing and shipping. As a result, iTero scanners save thousands of metric tons of PVS and plastic in our process.

Reducing our environmental impact

Globally, we are committed to reducing the environmental impact of our operations by using energy efficient building designs and controls (e.g. solar panels, motion activated lights, LED lighting, etc.). . We also have programs in place to reduce emissions from employee transportation by providing car charging stations that promote zero or low emissions cars, incentives for carpooling, and organizing company sponsored employee transportation. In San Jose, California, approximately 1/3 of the workforce in 2023 uses an electric vehicle (EV), taking advantage of the employee benefit of free onsite EV charging. To-date, the EV Charging program has avoided an estimated 279 metric tons of CO2 emissions. We have begun the process of eliminating single use plastics in our cafeterias.


Align Technology Switzerland

Responsible Procurement Practices

Our suppliers are essential to all aspects of our business and our supplier relationships are based on trust and shared commitments to ethical and legal conduct. We choose key suppliers that have implemented sustainable business practices to serve our core business processes.

  • We expect our supply partners to follow the highest standards in the industry, such as ISO 14001, and we require our suppliers to adhere to responsible sourcing. We prohibit our suppliers from profiting from the sale of tantalum, tin, tungsten, and gold ("conflict minerals") that funds conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and adjoining countries and require them to source such minerals from socially responsible suppliers.
  • We expect our suppliers to respect human rights and treat others fairly, including complying with labor and employment laws, namely minimum wages, overtime, forced and child labors, not unlawfully confiscating immigration documents, and respecting the rights of individuals to return to their home countries.