Trying to minimise our negative impact on the environment is becoming increasingly important for everybody, and every business.
There’s no getting away from the fact that our industry involves using a lot of paper and produces CO2 emissions across both the production and transportation of direct mail items.
We are constantly exploring ways to ensure that our offering is as eco-friendly as possible and aligned with your sustainability goals. Unlike a lot of industries, making your offline marketing campaign more sustainable isn’t always an additional cost, and can actually save you money and/or improve your ROI.
Materials
The key to making offline marketing campaigns more environmentally sound is ensuring our paper stock comes from sustainable sources. We always ensure that our partners and suppliers are FSC or PEFC certified.
The FSC and PEFC are both certification bodies that monitor global forests and ensure they are sustainable. The FSC audit every single company along the supply chain of production for direct mail items, making sure that every single company involved is using sustainable resources. You can even place a logo on communications that allows that piece of paper to be traced back to the forest it came from, helping your audience feel assured, and it can even save you money under a Royal Mail Incentive scheme.
There is also the option to use recycled paper. 100% recycled paper can be more expensive due to the additional processes required to make it, but you could use a blend of recycled and virgin fibre to make a stock more cost effective. Recycle paper comes in many different finishes and textures, some can replicate non-recycled paper and some are unique to recycled paper, it all depends on the look and feel you’re after.
Not using fully recycled paper isn’t always as bad as people think. Virgin fibre is not harmful to the environment, as long as it’s come from a sustainable source. Well managed forests promote livelihoods, ecosystem services and biodiversity.
Carbon balancing
Carbon Balancing is a way of capturing the unavoidable emissions caused in the manufacturing process of paper stock. We have introduced an opt-out surcharge to our campaigns, this surcharge goes directly to the World Land Trust, an international conservation charity that projects the world’s most biologically significant and threatened habitats.
The cost is often as small as £6.50 for a run of 85,000 DL mailers, but the benefits are huge. By taking part in our carbon balancing programme, you can offset the carbon emissions of your offline marketing project by funding the protection and restoration of carbon-rich wildlife habitats in the tropics.
You’ll receive a unique certificate that shows how much carbon dioxide you’ve captured and how much land your business has protected. As well as a certificate, you’ll be able to use the World Land Trust logo on your mailer, demonstrating to customers that you care and are doing your bit to tackle climate change. You’ll also be eligible to use Royal Mail’s sustainability scheme giving you access to lower postage prices.
In just Q3 and Q4 of 2021 alone we offset 166,093 KG of carbon and preserved 99,341M2 of vulnerable land.
Best practice and reducing waste
As you can probably tell, making our business as sustainable as possible is something we’re passionate about. That’s why we pride ourselves on avoiding waste wherever possible. Thanks to our expertise and experience, we ensure campaigns are super-efficient; only producing what is needed, and cleansing data to remove wastage and improve targeting and response rates.
Thanks to our long-term relationships with ethical suppliers, our expertise and experiencing driving efficiencies, and our automatic carbon balancing scheme – we are making direct mail as sustainable as possible, while giving you a platform to show your own sustainable commitment to your audiences.
Want to start your own carbon balanced direct mail campaign? Or simply want to find out a bit more? Then get in touch.
