When Simon Biltcliffe departed the British Printing Corporation in 1996 he set up Webmart with little more than his own knowledge about the configuration of every web offset printer and press across Europe. Nobody else had bothered to compile this data but it enabled the fledgling business to take a project and allocate this to the most suitable press for that job, according to the number of pages, run length, grain direction, timing and so on. Webmart could advise on the best printer to use for whatever project the marketing team planned.
While Webmart has grown and evolved in the 27 years since and web offset printing has changed just as drastically, the fundamental task of matching a job to the most suitable printer for that remains. It’s about knowledge and data.
Now Webmart and its customers are getting a new vessel to help navigate that sea of data: a carbon calculator for an entire marketing campaign. It is a first for the marketing industry and one that is very much needed. And just as with Biltcliffe’s directory of presses and printers, nobody else has this information.
Tom Maskill, Webmart’s sales and sustainability director, says: “We have been developing EcoMetrics for three years so we can work out the impact of a campaign over lots of channels so we can give marketers and sustainability professionals the data they need to make informed choices.”
Sustainability and carbon accountability are everywhere, permeating all levels of corporate decision making even if accurate and reliable information has been missing: what is the carbon footprint of an email and website, how does that compare to a print led campaign? Webmart is filling that gap.
It has spawned what Biltcliffe believes will be new terms for marketers: Return on Carbon Emitted and the Carbon Cost of Acquisition. If in 1996 knowledge about the industry’s technical capabilities was not widely spread, in 2023 knowledge about its carbon footprint is sparse at best. Webmart will be the company with unique knowledge about the carbon capabilities of printers across the industry and the papers that are available.
It is also a close fit with the company’s own ethos. The founder drives an EV; it owns a 164-acre patch of Scotland, an oxygen farm the company calls it, which is being rewilded through planting native woodland; it has cut its own Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions by 70%; the electricity it consumes is entirely from renewable sources. Webmart walks the walk.
Three years ago Webmart started on a journey to change the wider marketing sector, looking at where carbon is created across the entire marketing supply chain from concept to a communication received by a customer in whatever form. This has now led to EcoMetrics which Maskill presented to a small group of customers in Bicester last month ahead of a full roll out of the service.
Webmart has worked with Carbon Quota, gathering information under protocols established by ISO17569, PAS 2050 and PAS 2060 to describe how to measure the impacts of print and so on. There are some standard figures to work with – the government has a tool to calculate the carbon footprint of energy according to the mix of electricity generation used in the UK for example, while press manufacturers have power consumption figures for each of their machines. Press speeds are also known. So far so simple.
But the carbon needed for paper production, shipping that paper, finishing it and distributing it after printing have all needed additional data collection and compilation into the calculation engine. The figures have then been validated by Climate Partner to ensure that there can be no hint of greenwash.
The first outcome of the work has been Enviromail, a carbon calculator to work out the amount of carbon from the doorstep back up to regional sorting centres through the distribution chain to the most suitable printer to handle the job and mailing house to get it to the Royal Mail hub.
EcoMetrics, as the new product is named, goes much further.
It enables Webmart to calculate the carbon footprint of any marketing campaign, regardless of whether print, digital or combined. While there are carbon calculators for printing, there is nothing that can be relied upon for the digital sphere. The Royal Mail’s MarketReach division has for example published a Life Cycle Analysis for print and mail, which lacks any of the hard, granular information that can be challenged and which Webmart has collected.
As a result Webmart can run a calculation of any campaign and then suggest ways to reduce the impact, by changing paper to a recycled grade perhaps, by de-duping names and addresses running exclusion files to optimise a digital campaign or by switching to a fully recyclable product rather than one where some elements end up in landfill.
Maskill explains: “When a customer is presented with an Option A with no extra consideration for the environment and Option B with carbon offset paper included for an extra £1,000, that is not enough information to base a decision on. And that is what we are trying to fix.”
So the estimate for a campaign before EcoMetrics will include the carbon associated with text and cover papers, with the running time on press, guillotine and stitching line, the ink, packing in cartons and delivery to a mailing house. The onward element may then be into a Royal Mail distribution point to regional and local sorting offices and to the doorstep and to an end of life, assuming that collection falls in line with the UK average. More is included for returns. And then a percentage of consumers will visit a website and percentage will purchase as a result. The carbon capture per acquisition in this journey amounts to 185.8kg/CO2e.
Then EcoMetric steps in. Change the paper to recycled, improve the list to reduce returns, make the pack fully recyclable and improve the website so that navigation to make a purchase is reduced. The result across the whole campaign is a saving of 8.5 tonnes CO2e and a cost per acquisition which is cut to 137.3kg/CO2e.
The carbon estimate will be raised alongside the normal financial estimate calculated with any job because the same combination of fixed and variable choices come into play. Webmart is in a strong position to be able to do that as for the last 20 years its pricing engine has taken account of items like inks, plates, hours on press and all the other elements that impact the price of a job. It has a mountain of data to mine, making it relatively straightforward to apply a carbon impact as well as cost to each of these steps.
Print though is not enough. The focus of the work behind EcoMetrics is to be able to run the same calculation for a digital campaign. This has involved scouring the published literature to try to get a validated figure for an email or a website; it has involved talking to academics in universities that are trying to understand carbon and climate change; it has involved talking to the companies that run the server farms and understanding how these are powered.
This has thrown up some interesting data: there are 16,433 tonnes of CO2 in the UK each year stemming from people sending a simple ‘thanks’ email. Everything has an impact and Webmart is trying to measure everything.
“It’s a four-step approach,” says Maskill. “First we calculate the current impacts and what can be controlled through the production and supply chain. Next we mitigate some of these to reduce the carbon generated, perhaps by omitting some steps or in the choice of materials made. Then we offset what carbon is left using a validated scheme managed by Climate Partner and then we communicate this to all those involved.”
For a direct mail piece the areas to be considered for mitigation would include choice of design, paper, choice of printing method, distribution ad the number of boxes required, how these reach the mailing house and onward travel from there. With Enviromail Webmart has already shown that the choice of Royal Mail location as well as down stream access may have a significant impact on the carbon associated with that campaign depending on the demographics of that campaign.
What has not yet been plugged into the Webmart calculator is the work that printers have themselves been doing on carbon reduction through self generation of electricity for example and other means to cut their Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions. Once included this will inevitably give the most sustainable printers an advantage over the least sustainable. Likewise certain presses are more efficient than others. As EcoMetrics develops, it will account for these differences. “Ultimately EcoMetrics will fuel decision making in the marketing sector which is both commercially and environmentally sustainable,” the company says.
It is perhaps no longer the early bird that catches the worm, but the greenest bird.
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