From going completely naked to setting up dedicated ‘green teams’, committing to using 100% recycled board to re-engineering packaging to make it plastic-free, greeting card publishers have made considerable progress on their respective sustainable journeys. As COP26 makes headway at the global leaders’ meeting in Glasgow, in the first of a series, PG Buzz shares some of the green pledges from those in our sector.
First up is James Ellis Stevens which, at the start of last year, made a significant commitment to sustainability by joining ‘1% for the Planet’, which has seen the greeting card publisher donate 1% of its turnover to environmental causes.
James Stevens, founder and owner of the publishing business explains more…
“We joined 1% for the Planet in February 2020 with a commitment to donate 1% of our turnover to environmentally-focused charities. The idea behind 1% for Planet is that the planet suffers as a result of business activity and this gives something back. Donating 1% of turnover as opposed to profit is also important – the commitment is still made regardless of profitability which has made us think more carefully about what we do.
Membership allows us to include the 1% for the Planet logo on the back of all our cards. While more established in the US, recognition of the name and logo is growing in the UK.
Every couple of months since we joined 1% for the Planet, we’ve made donations to various charities. Our first donation went to Avon Needs Trees (an organisation committed to buying land to re-wild and plant trees on) while we’ve also donated to Surfers Against Sewage (which focuses on removing plastic from beaches) as well as to Tenwa, which plants trees in Africa and to several other good causes.
I’ve never been a fan of Black Friday and the mayhem it produces in shops, business and on our roads, so last November we decided to donate 100% of the sales we made on Black Friday from both the retail and trade sides of our business. Our sales on that day were £3,536 and we gave it all to Avon Needs Trees, something our customers really appreciated. This year we are planning to do a similar joint promotion, this time working with a specific retailer and are currently finalising the details for this.
Membership of 1% for the Planet has definitely affected how we now design our products. It is pointless paying out to an organisation involved in clearing up single use plastic if you are generating, so we implemented a UK cello-free policy in 2019. Initially we were still wrapping our cards for some customers, but we decided to completely stop this at the end of 2020, and we are also stopping wrapping our cards for our overseas distributors at the end of this year. We did look into bio alternatives, but these can take hundreds of years to degrade.
We know we have lost some customers through our decision to become plastic-free and that’s a shame, but we’ve gained others and we feel it is really important to start to do things that reduce our impact on the planet. I feel we will look back at this in several years’ time and wonder why we ever wrapped cards.
I see it as essential to design single use products to be 100% recyclable though it doesn’t help that each of the 87 county councils in the UK recycle different materials in different ways.
We very quickly realised that we’ve only scratched the surface in terms of what we could be doing on the environmental side, but so far we have designed a new plastic-free pack for our mini cards, had a waxed paper bag made as an alternative to outer bags and we’ve started using paper tape on our boxes, but there is so much more still to do.
My long-term goal for our business is to have a positive environmental impact although how we would achieve this hasn’t been worked out and we are not even close. We are taking one step at a time and with the changes we are making, and by donating 1% of our turnover, we are at least doing something in the meantime.”
You can see James Ellis’ listing on the 1% for the Planet online directory by clicking here.
You can learn more about the Hazeland project that the company has supported through Avon Needs Trees by clicking here.
Top: James Stevens is someone who appreciates our natural world and wants to help protect it.
