Banner evolution - Our environment
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Our Environment

Banner has environmental sustainability at the heart of our decision making. The planet needs urgent care and recognition of this fact has never been higher on the agenda. To achieve long-lasting change, we are working collaboratively across operations, employees, supply chain and customers, challenging everyone to make a stand to protect our natural environment for the security of future generations.

Our Themes

Carbon Neutral by 2035

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Procured Plastic Free

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Protect the Natural Environment

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Our Environment

Preserve & Protect: What we're doing

The environmental footprint of our business is large. Our action to mitigate this is quite simple: to scope out changes that can be made and work out how to implement them. Each of our environmental themes is supported by a number of targets, applicable in different ways across our business - some require longer term investigation and business cases whilst others are policy led and can be implemented with the assistance of our customers, suppliers or employees.

Our B Green catalogue makes sustainable procurement simpler for customers. It includes a vast range of sustainable alternative products in categories from cleaning and catering to office supplies and printers.

The Catalogue also features a guide to understanding all the different product sustainability accreditations and covers what to look for to determine if products that don’t have any accreditations are still green and worth looking into.

Browse our B Green brochure

B Green Catalogue Image
Carbon Neutral by 2035

On our journey to become a Net Zero carbon emissions business, Banner has set a Carbon Neutral Milestone in 2035. It is a key point in our Decarbonisation Plan, committing to reducing our footprint until 2045 and increasing emissions we remove from the atmosphere through afforestation or similar projects.

We are working hard across all our operations, supply chain and customer base to scope and action decarbonisation plans wherever possible to reduce our footprint. Achieving carbon neutral will require behavioural changes as well as significant investment and expertise in procurement. However, more and more people now understand the consequence of climate change brought about by excess greenhouse gases and are willing to work towards a decarbonised future.

Our 2024 Banner Catalogue 
Environment Icon

Starting the year with a bang, the 2024 Banner catalogue demonstrates the impacts a good responsible procurement process can have.

We've Introduced Smaller Cardboard Packaging

Hybrid home working, along with lead-time issues and product shortages has meant an increase in small order volumes, creating a host of inefficiencies within operations.  The simple change of introducing a smaller sized cardboard box has resulted in a variety of quick wins.

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Cardboard reduction
Zero waste to Landfill
Zero waste to landfill image

All our warehouses sites across the UK are zero waste to landfill, which means all our waste is recycled. We drive down our overall waste by providing recycling facilities across all our site, this includes recycling all our broken pallets through a dedicated supplier. We’re identifying the current waste disposal routes, communicating them to everyone internally and encouraging innovation to design waste out of our system.

We also work with our customers to find innovative ways to reduce waste, such as our battery, toner and furniture recycle services.

As part of our ongoing commitment we regularly donate surplus stock to our local communities. Most recently we have provided easy access to improved hand hygiene through a donation of sanitiser to support those most in need.

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Banner and Edding UK join forces to support the Trees for Schools Initiative
Edding blog cover

The sun came out for us last week, 26th April 2022, at the tree planting ceremony organised by Tree Appeal and Edding UK. As Edding UK's partner, Banner got their hands dirty as part of the tree-planting team at Ryecroft Academy in Leeds.

The sun came out for us last week, 26th April 2022, at the tree planting ceremony organised by Tree Appeal and Edding UK. As Edding UK's partner, Banner got their hands dirty as part of the tree-planting team at Ryecroft Academy in Leeds.

Four members of the Banner team - Alex Clayton, Kirk Townsend, Alex Milano-Tee and Natasha Barker - joined colleagues from Edding, as well as a big group of pupils from Ryecroft Academy, and got stuck in to planting over 200 trees of different varieties - helping us and them learn more about sustainability and the environment.

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Reduced Carbon Emissions
Truline

Bulk ordering our packaging cartons will help to improve Banner's carbon footprint by cutting transport emissions. We’ve changed our daily delivery of 5 pallets of packaging cartons to a bulk delivery once every 2 weeks. The outcome is greater efficiency, less CO2 and reduced fuel used across fewer deliveries. 

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Saving water

We have plans to install water usage efficiency measures wherever possible in our operation. We’ll introduce water meters and run education campaigns to reduce water usage. Additionally, we have set ourselves a challenge to reduce dependency on potable water for our toilets and gardens.

Lighting

Energy efficiency measures, such as LED lighting, have been introduced and other low energy devices are also being rolled out across our workplace.

Certification

Achieving the industry standard certificate, ISO 14000, demonstrates our commitment to designing and implementing an effective environmental system.

Procured Plastic Free

Plastic has received significant bad press and there is a raft of new legislation around it, but not all plastics are bad. Plastic serves many purposes and when designed for reuse or recycling, provides excellent materials for the circular economy, but currently too much of it ends up in incineration waste streams, especially from businesses. This is why at Banner, we are taking a stance to remove 'added' plastics within our operations. We are scoping suitable alternatives wherever possible and of course working with our suppliers to eliminate unnecessary plastic from packaging around their products.

Void Fill
Banner has introduced eco-friendly packages throughout its warehouses. The new packaging fill of recycled cardboard is used for small pick parcels, of which we deliver 6,000 a week.
Eco-friendly packaging - shredded
By recycling our used or damaged cardboard boxes into shock absorbent netted material, we are currently shredding and recycling over 360 tonnes of cardboard per year, equivalent to the weight of around 72 Asian elephants.
Environmental & Sustainable Benefits
Green Optimisa Image

Banner has helped one of our customers with an exclusive tool, Green OPTIMISA, where we were able to analyse all of the metrics behind their account to produce an optimised model, making the service more environmentally effective; lowering the CO2, fuel, paper, water and electricity used to deliver the goods.

Read the full story here

Respectful

Would you like to achieve high print quality and sustainability in one simple move?

Meet our exclusive new range of Respectful toner cartridges.

Respectful toner cartridge box

Delivering a guaranteed high standard of print, cost-saving and excellent environmental performance, Respectful is the new Banner range that replaces our laser cartridge products.

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Reducing Waste

We’ve reduced our cardboard wastage by utilising a wider range of different sized packaging cartons as they no longer need to be cut down because there’s a suitable size for most orders. 

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Reduced wasting
Supporting the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) 

The DVLA, is dedicated to be purchasing more sustainable and efficient products that assist towards their Greening Government Commitments (GGC).

When the DVLA approached Banner to support them to source and provide a plastic free envelope, Banner had the expertise and experience to provide a solution.  

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DVLA Envelope
We've Saved 10 Tonnes of Plastic from our Packaging of Paper

We’ve removed all plastic from the packaging and reduced damage rates, which results in less returns and paper wastage – that’s what we call a win win!

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Paper ream box
Plastic Packaging Tape
Biodegradable gummed paper tape

We’ve replaced traditional plastic packaging tape with 100% recyclable and biodegradable gummed paper tape, which is also faster to apply and gives a more consistent result. Eliminating 450,000 metres of plastic packaging tape from parcels.

Protect the Natural Environment

More and more people are of the opinion that if you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem. When it comes to protecting the natural environment, Banner believe we can all play a part. Our targets within this area of Evolution CSR involve greening spaces within our workplaces to attract insects and animals and reducing the use of limited resources, such as water. Linked to the Community Pillar, we also support charities and projects that work on afforestation and habitat protection, ensuring that we provide social value through our environmental work.

Bio-Diversity Garden

Banner aims to increase biodiversity across all of our sites. One step to meet this objective has been to open our first biodiversity garden at our Normanton site in Yorkshire. The new biodiversity garden includes bird boxes, wildlife feeding stations and has been completed with a Bee hotel, all of which help to support the local wildlife.

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Biodiversity Garden
Saving Water
We have plans to install water usage efficiency measures wherever possible in our operation. We’ll introduce water meters and run education campaigns to reduce water usage. Additionally, we have set ourselves a challenge to reduce dependency on potable water for our toilets and gardens.