Environment and Sustainability

From a long-term partnership with the Woodland Trust Carbon Capture scheme, to sourcing environmentally friendly material for our signs and print departments and using carbon neutral website hosting, we’re doing our best to care for the planet.

A dedicated environmental manager oversees our own efforts and ensures our suppliers are maintaining the best eco-friendly standards. 

We were the first company in Cumbria to achieve the international and independent ISO 14001 certification for environmental management, putting us in the top 300 energy efficient companies in the UK.

Our commitment to the environment was recognised in 2019 when we won the inaugural award for Cumbria’s Best Ethical/Green Business at the in-Cumbria Business Awards.

We take part in a national tree planting scheme to offset the carbon footprint of our paper supplies

Since 2015, we’ve funded the planting of enough native UK woodland trees to cover five football pitches – or more than 35,000 square metres.

We’ve achieved this through our participation in the Woodland Trust’s Carbon Capture scheme, which is designed to mitigate the CO2 emissions generated by paper production, storage and distribution.

This is how it works:

We pay a levy on the paper that we buy, which is donated to the Woodland Trust.

The Trust uses the money to fund the planting of natural, deciduous woodland trees in Britain.

The trees absorb carbon that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere and the project improves air quality, restores natural habitats and reduces flooding.

We’re able to see the scheme through to the end result when our team members take part in tree planting days.

Being part of such a successful venture helps our customers to enhance their own environmental credentials, at no extra cost to them.

Paper is our biggest raw material and we only use responsibly sourced and certified supplies from reputable, managed forests.

Servers that keep websites running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week are likely to be part of a large data centre, which are necessary for housing servers and providing hosting and colocation services. They use a large amount of energy and emit tonnes of CO2 every year. We believe that hosting a website should not contribute to your carbon footprint. However, not all hosting companies are equal, so Reeds made an ethical choice to use a hosting company that is powered with renewable energy.

Our hosting company partner is based in the UK and is now a carbon neutral business, achieving PAS 2060 with:

100% Carbon neutral office and data centres

100% Carbon neutral for our hosting solutions

Our web & digital business shares the same high environmental standards as that of our print and signage business.  Green digital has helped us take a significant step forward with our green programme, helping local business improve their carbon footprints.

Website performance and environmental impact are not often associated together, however slow websites take longer to load and therefore use far more energy. Reeds develop websites that consistently achieve exceptional load speeds, and therefore use significantly less energy.  Good technical SEO also directly benefits the performance of a website. By continually striving to improve page load speed and mobile friendliness will help save energy. Many of the Google ranking factors are by default, energy savers.