Waste is a dirty word: How Webmart is tackling waste at all levels

Webmart's commitment to reducing waste permeates every aspect of our business: reducing waste in our offices, reducing waste from our suppliers, and reducing waste for our customers.

What

Webmart have taken their green ethos and continue to build on it with new ventures into reducing waste throughout the printing process. As a by-product of our aim to reduce material and energy waste from mismanagement or inefficiencies, waste in the form of money, time and effort has been drastically reduced. So our customers' and suppliers' aims to cut costs and reduce waste can go hand in hand.

Why

"Do well and do good" has been Webmart's motto since Simon Biltcliffe founded the company in 1996. Fundamental to his own, and subsequently, Webmart's beliefs, is a concerted effort to behave with integrity and honesty towards customers and suppliers, society and the environment.

Rather than a reactive effort to customer or government pressure, Webmart have always led the way in promoting sustainability. Even market opportunity was not a driver for us - we genuinely care about our effect on the world around us and we would not be the company we are if this was not one of our core concerns.

How

Webmart handles over £30m of print work each year, and with that amount of contact with printers and print buyers, we have a significant opportunity to educate, inform and recommend in the industry.

As well as being carbon neutral and advising customers on eco-friendly materials for their print jobs, tracking Print Miles so our customers can see the impact delivery and distance has on their job, donating money on our customers' behalf to the Webmart Oxygen Farm, and of course, holding accreditations from all the leading green organisations.

What we are focusing on now is reducing waste. Not just our own, but the waste that our suppliers and customers face at many stages in the print process. We aim to manage and dispose of all waste in a responsible manner, seeking to keep wastage to a minimum and maximising the efficient use of energy and materials.

We developed software inhouse that enabled us to track and therefore eliminate or significantly reduce waste - wasted effort, wasted paper, wasted journeys, wasted time, wasted money - and then passed on this software to our suppliers and our clients.

Now they can manage their own waste reduction, for example:

• Print buyers can choose to gather quotes only from printers in their area, reducing waste on fuel, time and money.
• Printers can sell their spare press capacity for free, so they eliminate the waste of having print presses sitting idle.
• Procurement managers have insight into and can better develop relationships with the whole supply chain via a shared dashboard, reducing waste incurred by miscommunication through the chain.
• With insight into a huge database of suppliers, our customers can approach only those that have the right equipment, skills and capacity for the job, reducing wasted materials, labour and energy that result from these inefficiencies.

Our suppliers and customers have been delighted to get their hands on this software, because for the first time, they really do have transparency into the supply chain, and can actively reduce waste at so many levels. Customers can prove the wastage that has been avoided by selecting the right suppliers, at the right price, at the right location, and printers. It is measurable in terms of reduced administration, reduced carbon emissions, and higher cost-savings.

We're even reducing the waste of our efforts in the gym! The energy produced from staff working out in the gym is converted back into electricity to help power our offices.

We are lucky in that the desire to reduce waste, improve our environmental standing and do good is installed in every member of staff. And because it is not an afterthought, our suppliers and clients trust our integrity in green matters. They know we take it seriously and our management processes ensure that environmental factors are considered during planning and implementation.

What next

Webmart will continue to develop new ways to reduce our negative impact on the environment - We are even experimenting with recycling our efforts in the gym back into electricity to help power our offices, and hopefully - have enough to give back to the grid!

Environmental concern can only grow in the consciousness of everyone in business, and we hope that our advice on materials and technology to our customers and suppliers will result in reduced waste and an increase in the use of sustainable, ethically produced materials.

For more information, please contact:

Louisa Hardwick
01869 321321
Louisa.hardwick@webmartuk.com 
www.webmartuk.com