Environmental Policy

working for a better future

Policy Aims

Ethstat Ethical Stationery CIC aims to protect the environment by ensuring the sustainable use and disposal of scarce resources, ensuring the company has the lowest carbon footprint and aiming to reduce its dependence on persistent organic pollutants.

Furthermore, we aim to use our leadership in this area to encourage other organisations to minimise their environmental impact and meet Carbon targets to assist in our fight for Climate Change.

Values

To do least harm to the planet and all its occupants.
To respect our customers and members, the workers that created the product and our staff.
To invest in the environment by supporting the activists, researchers, campaigners and indigenous groups that seek to protect it.
To encourage environmental participation in our customers and the business world.
To support recycling in the UK by selling as many products that are made from UK waste as possible.
To use research as a tool to support the continual evolution of our understanding of what constitutes best environmental practice.
To provide the highest quality product to ensure that our clients feel no need but to use the most environmentally responsible products available to them.
To encourage responsible buying and use of our products to reduce waste in the office environment.
To ensure that these values are articulated and shared on both sides of the supply chain.
To measure the impact of our FM supply and to demonstrate this to our members so that they can make an informed choice.
To encourage CO2 reduction reviews and to continually strive to be at the forefront of excellence in green office procurement.

This policy translates the core environmental aims and beliefs of the organisation into objectives and guidelines for action, which will inform and have an impact on all areas of our work.

As a Cooperative Ethstat Ethical Stationery CIC will:

Engage with grassroots environmental campaigns and environmental leaders to ensure we are working on areas of environmental substance.
Reduce our consumption of energy & materials.
Review and understand our supply chain from beginning to end.
Source environmental expertise for every facet of our customers, members and product experience, including each product area and every business process.
To offset the carbon cost of all our products and our administrative carbon cost to at least 140%.
To minimise waste production in all areas of the organisation and aim for waste-free processes. To this end we will work with community groups and commercial partners to maintain a recycling rate in excess of 80% of total waste.
To provide environmental information to our members on each of the lines of product we supply.
To source our products along a strict hierarchy that promotes UK PCW recycling and fairtrade certified goods where they exist.
To engage with other business to encourage environmental activism.
To evaluate each of the products in our range to understand what the environmental impact of every line is.
To work with our members to reduce their product list to goods that provide the least impact on our planet.
Use a packaging collective formed with local business to ensure that our goods are sent out in reused packaging.
We will publish our own monthly environmental impact statistics.
We use public mass transportation as our first choice and personal transport only as a last resort.
To include environmental and ethical considerations in investment decisions with all our partners where appropriate.

What we will not do:

Import cheap stock from China, Asia and the Americas to boost profit nor when the products are available locally.
Stock vast lines of stock that all do the same thing – we would rather have one type of pen that works than 30 different models that have different marketing but are substantially identical.
Send small orders off to give the appearance of customer service but actually cost the customer and the environment more in the long run.How we will monitor it. We will report to the following standards:
The Recycling Rate shall fall no lower than 80%
Waste to landfill will not exceed 1kg per person/month
Waste to recycling will not exceed 30Kg per person/month
Reused materials no more than 1000kg of packaging bought per year
Non Public Transport no higher than 500 miles per month

Ethstat Ethical Stationery CIC has developed a series of action plans to supplement each area of its environmental policy.

Our Suppliers

in Our Supply Chain

The cooperative works on a simple algorithm to select suppliers. We select our suppliers based on the following hierarchy:

How close the product is manufactured to the point of consumption.
The materials and processes used to make the product.
The social mission of the manufacturing organisation.

The cooperative operates a supplier policy and maintains a preferred supplier list. We conduct due diligence on all suppliers before allowing them to become a preferred supplier. This due diligence includes an online search to ensure that particular organisation has never been convicted of offences relating to environmental impact or modern slavery and on site audits (where relevant) which include a review of working conditions. Our policy framework forms part of our contract with all suppliers and they are required to confirm that no part of their business operations contradicts them. In addition to the above, as part of our contract with suppliers, we require that they confirm to us that:

They have taken steps to reduce their environmental impact within their business.
They audit their own suppliers environmental impact.
They do not engage in practices that cause environmental distruction.
We may terminate the contract at any time should they fail to maintain these standards.

Our performance indicators

We will know the effectiveness of the steps that we are taking to protect the environment if:

No reports are received from employees, the public, or
Environmental agencies and NGO’s do not report upon our suppliers.

Responsibilities

Responsibility for the cooperative’s environmental initiatives lies with the Managing board and is a set agenda item at all meetings. At the annual general meeting a report on all policies and the ethical risk assessment will be reviewed.