Achieving sustainability together: what we’re already doing
Reusing, recycling, sustainable transportation.... it provides significant green savings. Read more about these sustainable initiatives from CB below.
Reusing, recycling, sustainable transportation.... it provides significant green savings. Read more about these sustainable initiatives from CB below.
As part of the ‘Give this box a second date’ campaign, we encourage our retail customers to give our drivers back the boxes we use to deliver goods to them. Once they’re back in the warehouse we clean the boxes, if necessary, and use them again. On average we use every box 1.5 times. Together with our customers, we save 200,000 kilos of cardboard per year in this way.
All of our packaging materials are purchased locally and are FSC-certified. This might seem obvious, but it has a significant environmental impact.
Like many companies, CB has solar panels on the roof. What is special is that we also opt for panels on the facade. Together they generate 468,000 kWh per year; roughly equivalent to the electricity consumption of 134 households. The installation avoids 222 tons of CO2 emissions per year. Our newest warehouse (due for completion in the fall of 2024) will also be fitted with solar panels, enabling us to keep an important part of our own logistics process running.
Many of our roofs cannot support solar panels due to their construction. We are therefore keeping a close eye on the developments surrounding solar foil and other solutions.
We are building a new warehouse for bulk storage in Culemborg. The new warehouse will be as sustainable as possible. For example by reusing existing materials (the demolition rubble provides most of the new embankment needed under the floor) and by applying the latest technology for building materials, light entry and gasless heating. The building will also have solar panels. The warehouse will more than meet the so-called Breeam Excellent standard for sustainable buildings.
A significant percentage of the books we have in storage ultimately never ends up with the reader. Needless to say, when a customer asks us to remove old books from stock we choose the most environmentally friendly waste processing/recycling method. It is even better when we prevent this waste stream in the first place. Print-On-Demand offers a solution to this problem. Super-fast book production means that books are always available, which means you don’t need to keep large stocks to guarantee fast delivery. Our clients not only benefit in terms of the environment, but also in economic terms: no residual stocks and no unnecessary costs for production or storage. Moreover, we manage to reduce our footprint together: we achieve a reduction of approximately 1.11 kilos of CO2 per book and 2 to 13 litres of water per A4 page, depending on the type of paper.
All the CB printing facilities have the option of Ecolabel, PEFC or FSC certified paper. All of our paper types are produced with green energy. What’s more, we are continually introducing more sustainable types of paper.
Particularly for publishers abroad, we are reducing the footprint with Print-On-Demand. SAGE Publishing, for example, has chosen not to ship its products to Europe but to produce them locally in our printing facilities.
CB has been working for years on making its transport more sustainable. By working closely with a network of transporters, we ensure that we bundle flows of goods and together reduce our mileage. In 2023 our own fleet and drivers were transferred to transport company Tielbeke. Because Tielbeke works for many markets, trucks are less often half full. And Tielbeke invests in sustainable transport as CB has always done.
We offer our customers the option of not adding a packing slip in B2C orders. Many customers are already using this option, which means that together we are saving around 2 million A4 sheets per year. CB also takes the initiative to no longer add packing slips to B2B deliveries in the long term.
We now use LED lighting at all our locations. Together with our partner Renewi, we facilitate waste separation and sustainable recycling. Motion sensors are fitted in all our spaces so when there is no-one around the lights go off, and we also save on heating and cooling. CB has a sustainability coordinator and and we are preparing for the CSRD.
We told you above what we are already doing in terms of sustainability. Here you can read more about we are planning to do in the future..
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