Eight Days A Week puts record straight

A couple of years ago Lance Hill was preparing the presentation for the regular audits for the ISO certifications it holds, ISO 9001, ISO 27001 and ISO 14001, the standard for environmental management and fell to thinking. “What’s the next step we can take to become more sustainable?” he says. 

It kicked off research into how Eight Days A Week could become a carbon neutral business. It had joined Premier Paper’s carbon capture scheme around three years ago, paying a small premium per tonne to fund tree planting in the UK through the Woodland Trust. This was a start.

“We did some research to find a suitable partner to help us on the journey and came across Carbon Neutral Britain, a non profit organisation that could help with advice and how it could uncover what its carbon footprint was as a business.

“I was quite happy because the figures we had gathered for the ISO 14001 audit was about 80% of the data we needed.”

Gathering the missing figures was not too onerous, amounting to its Scope 1 & 2 emissions. And remaining carbon has been offset through audited schemes. Eight Days A Week was duly certified and two years ago achieved carbon neutral status. Now the task is to work with the baseline figures and figure out ways to cut them. 

The company had already switched to LED lighting. It had installed three EV charging points that can be used by staff and encourages employees to sign up to the cycle to work initiative. And it had installed one of the first Xerox Baltoro cutsheet inkjet presses in the UK.

This was to bring in house a job that the direct mail print and mailing house had been placing with an outside printer with a reelfed press. It meant an increase in volume for the Nottingham business, but then came an unexpected twist. In the first year of the job, its turnover increased 20% while energy consumption fell by 20%, says Hill.

The explanation was that a good amount work was switched from its iGen digital press to the Baltoro. This is because the energy required to image and fuse the toner is so much greater than that required to run the more productive inkjet technology. “This was fascinating for us to discover,” says Hill.

It has not been something that Xerox has stressed even though the business is part of the Xerox Premier Partners group. “Xerox could probably provide the support and help to get printers to Net Zero,” he says.

Certainly the customers like it. They can apply the Carbon Neutral logo to work that is sent out along with the indicia “printed by a carbon neutral printer”. “It helps when customers are being challenged for using print,” says Hill. “We think this gives us lots of marketing potential across the East Midlands region. Other printers should be doing the same to correct misconceptions about print.”