Elastic band challenge

‘Responsible Consumption’ is one of the key focus areas of our new environment strategy – ‘Delivering a Cleaner Environment’.

It is also the focus of this week’s Environment Awareness Week, when we’ll be looking at our new waste signage, which is aimed at developing consistency across the business, and promoting the need for all of us to conserve resources.

There will be a number of communications and initiatives throughout this week aimed at highlighting some of our current environmental initiatives and reminding colleagues of their responsibilities around waste.

Unfortunately, the business has a long-standing issue with elastic bands being dropped and left in the street. Although elastic bands are one of many useful tools we use to help us deliver customers’ mail, they are also among the most harmful items we use every day. Not only do discarded elastic bands cause harm to wildlife, they also damage our reputation when customers complain.

This week, we are launching the ‘Great Elastic Band Challenge’ – an initiative for colleagues to think laterally around how we can replace the use of elastic bands in some way, without adversely affecting our service, and/or ensure that every elastic band we use is returned for collection and reuse.

The challenge will be open for either teams or individuals to enter and is a great opportunity for colleagues to get involved in helping us improve our environmental performance, as well as our customer’s perceptions.

We need you to suggest/develop:

• a viable alternative to the elastic band, which is safe for the environment, and is as good as, or better than an elastic band at bundling mail
• a simple, but effective means of preventing elastic bands from falling to the ground.

Email Resource.efficiency@royalmail.com with your ideas. All suggestions must be in by Friday 5 February.