Our Commitment to Sustainable Packaging

CoLab, as part of the DCK Group, is committed to offering our clients the most sustainable and environmentally friendly options for their printing and mailing projects while at the same time reducing the carbon footprint of our own operations. Through several internal initiatives and industry best practice measures, we are focused on providing sustainable solutions for our customers.

Our primary sustainability initiatives are:

· FSC® Certification.

· Emissions and Waste Monitoring and Management.

· Carbon Offsetting for Projects.

These three pillars ensure that we consider sustainability at every part of our process:

· Sourcing materials responsibly through sustainable and responsible supply chains.

· Managing manufacturing in a sustainably effective way.

· Offering our customers the opportunity to offset any carbon generated in the production of their goods.

We believe our structured and formal approach to sustainability, coupled with the expertise, accountability and governance provided by outside organisations, helps us to continually improve our systems within organised frameworks as we move towards our ever-changing sustainability goals.

FSC Certified Materials

DCK is a Forest Stewardship Council® (FSC) certified business. As an FSC-certified business, DCK is part of a chain of custody (CoC) that ensures our paper is tracked back to the source and that these sources are responsibly and sustainably managed forests. For DCK, using FSC-certified paper is an excellent way to demonstrate a commitment to sustainability and responsible sourcing. As well as the Environmental benefits of FSC, such as reducing the impact of our operations on the environment, there are also social benefits as the certification also considers the social and economic welfare of forest-dependent communities.

Having the certification allows DCK to use the FSC logo and our unique FSC license number on products that we produce for the DSP should this tender proposal be successful. DCK’s unique FSC logo with license number is shown to the right here, and the certificate is attached as Appendix 3 of this tender response.

DCK will always buy and use FSC-certified materials first, as long as they are available. If they are not available or if a non-FSC material is specified, DCK will next go for PEFC and so on.

The primary materials that we use in our processes are paper and inks, and we can confirm that biodegradable inks are used in our printing processes.

DCK also have outsourcing agreements with any businesses that handle work for us but are not FSC-certified themselves. These agreements contain commitments from third-party suppliers that they will operate in compliance with FSC and control, segregate and track all certified materials that they use on our behalf.

Emissions and Waste

Energy and Emissions

DCK has been measuring and monitoring our carbon emissions since 2013. Our latest data for a full year is for the year 2021 and in 2022, with the help of our sustainability partners ClearStream Solutions and partial funding from an Enterprise Ireland Climate Action voucher, we took on a project to analyse the period 2019 – 2021.

We have collected all relevant data on:

· Scope 1 emissions (direct - from our plant and machinery)

· Scope 2 emissions (Purchased electricity)

· Scope 3 emissions (indirect - from our supply chain)

Our extensive research and data collection measures everything from our heating and water consumption to how far our staff travel to work and how they get there.

In the period from 2019 to 2021, our total Scope 1, Scope 2 and Scope 3 emissions fell by 24%.

Key findings were as follows:

Emissions relating to our facility went down, due to careful management of usage, changeover to LED lighting and other internal initiatives.
Diesel usage went up, due to employing a new nationwide salesperson. From this finding, we have committed to changing company vehicles from petrol/diesel to electric vehicles.
Purchased electricity emissions went down, due to lower usage as a result of close management.
Emissions related to waste, water, travel and purchasing dropped significantly.

Being this close to the detail allowed us to see that a lot of our emissions were the result of waste, and there was a direct correlation between cost saving and lowering emissions. There are, of course, exceptions to this, and there is a correlation between the productivity of the plant and emissions, but we can say that carbon intensity emissions measured against sales turnover have decreased each year since 2013, demonstrating that as sales have increased, emissions have increased at a slower rate.

There is also a very clear correlation between growing the field sales team and vehicle emissions.

The decrease in emissions of 24% over the period is the result of our continued monitoring of our emissions in a structured way, which highlights specific areas for improvement. This has allowed us to generate our next set of objectives for 2023:

Begin vehicles change from diesel to electric. The business has committed that any new vehicles will be electric, and any changes to existing vehicles will be to electric.
Change our power supplier to one based on generating power from sustainable sources.

Waste Disposal

As the bulk of what DCK produces contains data or is confidential or sensitive, we route all of our paper waste through a confidential shredding workflow. Materials are destroyed by shredding and recycling in accordance with the 1994 EU Packaging directive, the 1996 Waste Management Act and the Data Protection Act.

Compliance with Environmental Legislation and Regulations

DCK’s waste is managed and processed by Greenstar who are certified to ISO14001, which specifies requirements for an effective environmental management system (EMS). Packaging waste is segregated into 3 streams: paper, corrugated board and plastic. Less than 1% of the waste produced in the business is chemical waste, and this waste is batched and collected by Stericycle, a company that specialises in chemical waste management.

Carbon Offsetting

DCK also offers our clients the option to offset the carbon emissions impacts of their print projects. 100% of the emissions of a client’s print contract can be offset by our favoured offset provider, the World Land Trust. This WLT Carbon Offset programme offsets emissions by protecting threatened habitats that would otherwise have been lost, avoiding the release of stored carbon.

Confidential Waste Disposal

Materials will be destroyed by shredding and recycling in accordance with the 1994 EU Packaging directive, the 1996 Waste Management Act and the Data Protection Act.