Sustainable Mail

Marketreach are our letters champions! The team live and breathe letters and promote the effectiveness of mail communications to businesses. They have been developing sustainability credentials to help educate businesses that, when designed in the right way, mail can be a sustainable option within the marketing mix.

The starting point was carrying out a carbon life cycle assessment (LCA) of mail – to assess the carbon footprint of common mail formats (i.e. from a postcard to a large catalogue), taking into account the raw materials, right through to landfill.

The assessment highlights that mail can be both an effective and sustainable part of any communications mix. These sources have fed into our flagship marketing campaign packaged around the theme ‘Discover the Circular Advantage of Mail – if you haven’t seen it, you can take a look here.  

The Circular Advantage campaign examines mail circularity under four environmental pillars, to explain how mail marketing can be a positive environmental choice:

Regenerative 

• Paper comes from a natural regenerative crop – trees.
• It can be sourced from accredited forests that support tree planting, enriches biodiversity and draws down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.  

Reinvent:

• Low-impact modern paper mills run on 100% renewable energy, use total chlorine-free processes and 93% of water involved is recycled.
• Low-carbon, energy-efficient printing processes can use biodegradable and water-based inks.
• The way in which products and materials are reinvented can reduce pollution and waste.

Reduce:

• Royal Mail is on a journey to decarbonise with 5,000 electric vehicles by 2023 and this number will grow. 
• Royal Mail’s 90,000 posties walk over a billion steps a day, delivering to 31 million addresses. 
• Royal Mail’s Net-Zero strategy is already underway.   

Reuse:

• If we can keep products from landfill by maintaining, sharing and reusing them, we can reduce our impact.
• Royal Mail reuse ink cartridges, pallets, bags, among many other elements of its operations.
• Where products cannot be reused, recycling is a way to maximise the value of materials and components.
• For example, paper is readily recycled and can be reused again and again. Over 70% of fibres used to make paper in the UK are recycled and it can be reused many times over.

The assessment shows that mail can be more circular and isn’t necessarily wasteful, if materials are produced and managed it in the right way.

Marketreach provide guidance for marketers to help them reduce the environmental impact of their mailings, here you can also take a look at the carbon footprint of the most common mail formats here, along with tips on how to produce mail more sustainably.

At Royal Mail we are in a great position to be connecting businesses with households across the country, but we want the mail channel to be used sustainably. Help us to grow the awareness and help customers to discover the circular advantage of mail, by talking about this to your customers and also your friends and family.

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