Sustainability is quickly advancing to the forefront of corporate responsibility, and companies are increasingly seeking ways to minimize their environmental impact and make their customers aware of these efforts. There are many ways to increase the sustainability of your operations, including using renewable materials, streamlining shipping operations, and optimizing energy used to produce goods and services. When it comes to packaging, one effective way for brands to account for their environmental impact is through environmental offsetting.
Historically, calculating the natural resources consumed in paper-based packaging manufacturing and converting that data into a measurable statistic for businesses to use presented quite a challenge. Enter: PrintReleaf. A new technology company making carbon offsetting an easily achievable goal for manufacturers of paper-based print and packaging products, and the brands who use them.
We recently chatted with Ryan Wood from PrintReleaf to discuss environmental offsetting and how the company's platform can help brands achieve their sustainability goals. Here are our take-aways:
Environmental offsetting is a method of compensating for the unavoidable environmental impacts on one site by securing land at another site and managing that land to replace the environmental elements that were originally lost. Offsetting balances the scales by securing and nurturing land elsewhere to compensate for what’s gone.
There are different types of environmental offsets, such as afforestation, carbon offsets, biomass offsets, biodiversity offsets, and more, but the goal is the same: protect and nurture, to offset the impact of one place by caring for another.
Source: Queensland Government
Before you start the environmental offsetting process, the first step is to measure the impact of the region you are offsetting. Here’s an example illustrating how you would calculate carbon emissions:
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Starting with direct and indirect emissions from owned sources and purchased energy, to overall supply chain emissions, you will need to aggregate all the carbon emission data before you start the offsetting process.
As you can see, the calculation process is time and resource consuming, but nonetheless necessary.
PrintReleaf is a patented software platform that empowers businesses to sustain and grow our global forestry system. Their team has worked closely with industry experts in print and forestry to develop standards for measuring, offsetting, and verifying the successful reforestation of trees felled for paper consumption.
If you are a packaging company, PrintReleaf provides two essential services for offsetting print and packaging consumption: biomass offsets and carbon offsets.
To begin, PrintReleaf analyzes your brand’s paper and packaging consumption data, measuring the total environmental footprint it produces. They then reverse-calculate the number of trees needed and the carbon emissions produced during this consumption.
For their biomass offset service, PrintReleaf ensures trees are automatically replanted by certified global reforestation projects. Through their carbon offset service, they acquire certified carbon credits to counterbalance the environmental impact of your incurred paper-based consumption, from cradle to grave.
Better yet, PrintReleaf makes it easy for brands to track and display their offsetting progress with customizable online dashboards and unique QR codes that can be placed on every package to showcase their environmental stewardship to their customers.
They currently have over 5 million trees planted and have offset more than 1,500 metric tons of carbon.
Environmental offseting allows individuals and businesses to take responsibility for their environmental impact, particularly in industries where some environmental harm is unavoidable. It enables the preservation of critical ecosystems, biodiversity, and natural resources by compensating for impact elsewhere.
If you want to learn more about how PrintReleaf can help you achieve your sustainability goals, watch our webinar “Leveraging Environmental Offsets: Empowering Sustainable Printing” presented by PrintReleaf:
Ready to leverage environmental offsetting to reduce the environmental impact of your packaging? Contact our team of expert Packaging Advisors to start today.