Rethinking Business Practices: How Can You Reduce Impact on the Planet?
B Corp Seacourt Develops Printing Practices with Sustainability in Mind
Print is still the most powerful way to impact and influence your customers, and printed communications are shown to outperform digital time and again in both recall and response. Using a high-quality, environmentally responsible printer is a great way to engage your customers and to demonstrate you live by your principles.
As the highest-scoring printing or media Certified B Corporation in the world, Seacourt is proven to have a net positive environmental impact across all of its operations. The firm has won four Queen’s Awards for its achievements in sustainability as well as the European EMAS Award, reflecting its goal as a planet-positive business to do more good for the environment than harm.
Gareth Dinnage, Managing Director of Seacourt, explains how you can print in a way that is better for the environment.
(The following is a transcript from the video above.)
Dinnage: So, planet-positive printing is a result of a 25-year journey. We understood that there had to be a better way for the print industry to work and that doing less harm is no longer enough. We had to do more good. We’ve invented the printing process called LightTouch, which proved that absolute zero waste to landfill is possible, and to have a carbon-neutral factory that is running on 100% renewable energy. We sourced the lowest carbon impact paper and reduced the carbon impact per tonne year on year.
And then we realised even this was not enough. We needed to take ownership of our entire supply chain, which represents 95% of our carbon impact. Planet-positive printing, therefore, means we’ve gone beyond carbon neutral for our entire universe. This means scopes 1, 2, and 3 — everything that we’ve caused to happen we take responsibility for. We have measured our absolute carbon impact and then added 10% to take us from a carbon-neutral position to become planet positive. We then offset our total carbon impact plus 10% investing in cookstove projects in both Ghana and Bangladesh. This takes nearly 800 tonnes of carbon out of the atmosphere, creating social benefit, reducing fuel poverty, and enabling better health with cleaner air and reduced pollution.
Planet-positive printing, therefore, enables us and our clients to directly benefit our changing climate.
How Seacourt Measures Environmental Impact
Seacourt’s unique proposition is to be the most sustainable printing company in the UK. The question then is, how do you know how much of a carbon footprint your printing is making, and how much of a reduction would you make if you printed with Seacourt? Dinnage speaks about Seacourt’s Environmental Calculator in the below video.
(The following is a transcript from the video above.)
Dinnage: Our unique selling proposition is to be categorically the most sustainable printer in the UK. The question then is, how do you know? And if we are more sustainable, then by how much? What are the benefits? And how does this translate into value for my company and our readers?
We decided to create the Seacourt Environmental Calculator as a tool to show each client the carbon savings and other environmental savings made by choosing Seacourt. And also to show how we arrive at making the print order climate-change positive with net positive social impacts, we take full responsibility for our entire supply chain impact, and then we more than offset this by 110%, to make a net positive impact —this includes delivery to you.
We recognise that it’s now getting increasingly difficult to differentiate the good from the bad with the increasing greenwash around carbon neutral claims. This is where our calculator comes in —to show in a transparent way the actual carbon footprint attributed to your print order along the entire supply chain and using actual data, not industry estimates for just the paper, which to our mind are 49% below where they should be.
Now it’s not enough to just offset your paper, nor continue to be a polluting printer. You need to have done everything possible first, as offsets are not a permission to pollute.
B The Change gathers and shares the voices from within the movement of people using business as a force for good and the community of Certified B Corporations. The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the nonprofit B Lab.
