Product Premier Award
Product Premier Award 2010
Presented at The Lincoln Centre, London on 8 June 2010 by Sir Anthony Cleaver, President of BCE Environmental Leadership Awards.
Glebe Cottage
Greener Greetings
Sir Anthony Cleaver presenting the BCE Product Premier Award to Susanna Morrish, Glebe Cottage.
Glebe Cottage publishes high-quality, eco-friendly greetings cards. It produces over 500,000 cards a yea and, in 2007, had a turnover of £300,000. The company as the first direct-to-retail card publisher to gain FSC certification, the first to use compostable packaging
for cards and is a carbon neutral company. The ‘Greener Greetings’ project involved a series of environmental commitments and thought processes, which aimed to encourage and inspire a cleaner and greener greeting card industry. This was demonstrated in
the company’s own business by:
Developing environmentally relevant and meaningful ways of communicating positive environmental choices to consumers.Gaining appropriate certifications, such as FSC, to take its green claims valid and meaningful.
Undertaking a series of ‘eco-commitments’ that would apply to all products published (eg 100% recycled envelopes, recycled content board, low/noalcohol print technology, compostable bags and the use of green energy).
Informing retailers and other publishers about ‘eco-friendly’ choices in a retail sector that, at the beginning of 2007 had almost no green options.
Putting pressure on suppliers of paper, print, envelopes and bags to offer green choices to card publishers.
In its keynote speech to the Greeting Card Association (GCA) AGM, Glebe Cottage outlined how other publishers could implement green publishing and focused on the need for ‘environmentally relevant and meaningful’ eco-labelling so consumers can make positive environmental choices. These ideas have been instrumental in the formation of the Association’s green information resource ‘Model Environmental Policy’. The Chief Executive of the GCA commented ‘Glebe Cottage are inspirational. They punch well above their weight and are leading the sector in eco-friendly publishing’.
To see the Glebe Cottage video click here.
To find out more about this project, please contact:
sue@glebe-cottage.co.uk
www.glebe-cottage.co.uk