When the purpose of your business is to produce goods to fulfil demand, production and sustainability don't always feel like they go together. Thankfully, there are a variety of ways for businesses to reduce plastic use and decrease carbon emissions to slow climate change.
Alongside this, being sustainable isn’t so much an option or a ‘nice-to-have' for a business nowadays. It is - quite rightly - an expectation. In the past, consumers may have seen a product’s sustainability as a bonus, but now it is a major factor in purchasing decisions across many industries. We firmly believe that for the good of the planet, we must come together and do our bit to slow climate change. And this is a particularly important thing for businesses producing PPE to embrace, as they are significant users of plastic and producers of emissions.
A number of PPE companies are endeavouring to be sustainable by using recycled plastic in their products. Particularly given the Covid-19 pandemic, there's an even more pressing need to produce products that rely less on virgin plastics. According to BBC News, the UK National Health Service is estimated to have used an average of 14 million items of PPE every day between 25th February and 18th April 2020.
Using recycled plastic comes with some potential problems if it's the sole activity towards slowing climate change, including:
Many companies are adapting and in many cases transforming their business by becoming carbon neutral or developing carbon neutral products. The goal of carbon neutrality is simple - whatever carbon emissions are put into the atmosphere from production are balanced out by what is later removed from certain environmental activity. More on this below.
benefits
Becoming a Carbon Neutral neutral is definitely a marathon rather than a sprint, and while the benefits are significant, it's important to know the size of the commitment a company makes when they take this approach. Consider:
We developed our carbon neutral safety boot range ‘Lynx’ (pictured) and then went on to receive our ZeroCarbon® certification as a carbon neutral company, because we believed this process had some very high-impact benefits for the planet.
As part of our carbon neutral drive, we signed up to three global initiatives, Race To Zero, Climate Neutral Now and SME Climate Hub. These programmes meant we received emissions targets and were held accountable to them, ensuring our environmental practices stayed at the highest level and never wavered. Find out more here.
Added to this, we made some major sustainability enhancements to our manufacturing and supply chain. These included:
While many companies are doing great work in finding responsible manufacturing methods, unfortunately greenwashing and false or exaggerated sustainability claims remain common in the PPE market. It is therefore important to look out for verification and confirmation of the source of the recycled content claim being made about the product, and about how much impact this will truly have in the bigger picture.
Want to know how to spot greenwashing and false sustainability claims? We've written a blog on it to help you - find it here.
So, when it comes to responsible manufacturing, using recycled plastic has definite environmental benefits, but a carbon neutral approach decreases carbon which seeks to reduce and replace plastic rather than re-use it. Which ever approach you feel is right, what's certainly true is that environmental change - even if it's small and seemingly low impact initially - is possible and can have a massively positive effect, particularly if you're in a team committed to make a sustainability difference.
If you'd like to learn more about our carbon neutral range, get guidance on reducing plastic use or find out more of V12’s environmental aims and achievements, you can find it all on our sustainability page below.