We know you care about the planet. We do too. So, relax. Every job is carbon neutral.
Haybrooke and its customers have pledged an ongoing commitment to protect the environment and reduce the climate impact of our combined business activities, including the amount of plastic used in the supply chain and the CO2 emissions directly or indirectly attributable to our operations. We work with our environmental partner, Climate Impact Partners, to ensure that all CO2 (and equivalent) emissions produced by the printing supply chain in PDQ is balanced through quality carbon offsetting.
How is this possible?
Energy
We control the production calculation for all printing suppliers in PDQ. Our methodology is based upon a sophisticated algorithm that allows us to not only calculate the manufacturing methods that will be used by each printer for a job, but also the energy – in kilowatt hours – that will be consumed by the machinery as the job is produced. We use this data to determine the manufacturing CO2 emissions as a result, adopting the UK Government’s published energy/emissions for grid electricity to calculate the carbon impact.
It is not just the manufacturing (pre-press, printing, binding and finishing) CO2 emissions that are taken into account; the environmental cost of paper and delivery is also taken into consideration for the purposes of offsetting the total end-to-end carbon emissions.
Paper
Paper is a carbon intensive printing consumable, typically responsible for anything between one half and one tonne of CO2 for every tonne of paper made. We take the CO2 ratings provided by the paper manufacturers and merchants for its paper product ranges and add these into our own emissions equation. The paper sector itself is responsible for emitting c. 4.7 million tonnes of CO2 annually for a production output of c. 5.2 million tonnes of paper (source: Carbon Trust). This equates to average emissions of 0.9 tonnes of CO2 (and equivalents) for every tonne of paper made; the emissions being dominated by the drying element of the manufacturing process:
Transportation
Finally, we calculate the CO2 emissions related specifically to the delivery of a job. This is based upon the type of transportation used and takes into account the job weight being hauled, the number of deliveries and the total mileage to and from the delivery destination(s).
This all goes to ensure that the calculation we use to feed our reporting to Climate Impact Partners for the purpose of offsetting our suppliers’ end-to-end CO2 emissions is as accurate as it can possibly be. It has to be. The complex manufacturing process that is print is hard enough to measure in terms of CO2 emissions, even for an individual printing company; let alone the entire supply chain, as we do with PDQ.
What is the cost of carbon balanced print?
Considering the relatively large amount of CO2 directly attributable to the printing process, it is surprisingly cost effective to balance the environmental impacts of printing through the mechanism of carbon offsetting. Each tonne of print-generated CO2 can be effectively neutralised with small investments into projects that are certified to save or offset the equivalent in CO2.
PDQ shows a print buyer the most environmentally friendly solution for any printing job specification from each supplier and how they might change that specification to see an improvement. This is the production/energy/CO2 algorithm sitting at the heart of PDQ; and it is helping to redefine the way customers buy print .
Climate Impact Partners
Haybrooke and Climate Impact Partners, share a common goal. We believe that global environmental and sustainability challenges like climate change and poverty cannot be tackled in isolation and that business, both big and small, has a crucial role to play if we are to achieve sustainable development for all.
We chose Climate Impact Partners as our environmental partner because:
- They share our ambitions and our values, which underpin everything we do
- They are trusted by big business and the public sector
- They help create sustainable futures for the communities and partners they work with
- They intelligently create effective ways to deliver value, create legacy and push boundaries
- They deliver positive social and environmental impacts at the scale we need
PAS 2060
Because we are part of such a power-hungry manufacturing sector – the printing industry – we are committed to reducing ours and our suppliers’ impact on the environment. Haybrooke’s is the first hosting provider to be certified as carbon neutral under PAS 2060. Not only are we leading the way by reducing our operational carbon footprint; we’re also helping our customers to reduce theirs, too.