Seacourt is the highest scoring B Corp printing company on the planet, they believe in business as a force for good for society. Fun facts: Seacourt is the winner of the Queens award for sustainable development. They’ve won this three times! In 2017, they were also crowned Europe’s most sustainable SME! No wonder they are recognised as one of the top three leading environmental printers in the world! Seacourt Managing Director, Gareth Dinnage, joined us for an interview to tell us about Seacourt’s journey and its initiatives. Gareth has been part of Seacourt’s sustainability journey from the very start. He started his journey first as apprentice and then heading up to Sales and Marketing and finally owner and Managing Director.   You’ll learn about: Seacourt’s sustainability journey Environmental management as a guiding principle for Seacourt and their contributions to the environment Seacourt’s journey to understanding their carbon footprint Significance of being Net Carbon Zero B Corp How ISO 9001 and 14001 helps Seacourt run their business Understanding your supply chain   Let’s start right back at the beginning of Seacourt’s journey! Where did Seacourt begin and where did its sustainability journey begin? Seacourt started in 1946! They were set up as a commercial printing company in Oxford, working with local businesses. Not much changed for them until the mid-90s, when the owners at the time had the good fortune to attend a seminar focused on sustainability. We know what you must be thinking, whoever put together this seminar must have had incredible foresight, to have looked into commercial impacts and sustainability! The owners realised that the printing industry is among the fifth largest manufacturing sectors in the UK since 1996… And that it’s also the fourth worst polluter! That’s when they decided that they don’t want to be part of the problem, but a part of the solution. This thought marks the moment of a change of goals and priorities for Seacourt. From this point in 1996, the business changed from a linear business model, focusing on outputs, to becoming a value-based business, to considering the impacts on the environment and society, as well as profits. This marked the magic transformation of Seacourt! For the last 25 years, their philosophy has been “will this improve the environmental performance of our business. If the answer is “yes!”, then they do it regardless of the financial cost. So, without this fundamental change in mindset, Seacourt would not have been where it is today.   Guiding principle for Seacourt Environmental management has been a guiding principle for Seacourt for the past 25 years. It’s fundamental and core to the company. Currently: Seacourt runs on 100% renewal energy (and have done so for decades) They invented their own printing process called ‘LightTouch’. This has saved them gallons of fresh litres of water Seacourt no longer uses water or chemicals in their printing process! They have been zero waste to landfill for over a decade. They are carbon positive -and that’s scope 1,2 and 3! What this means, for those of you that aren’t familiar with this concept, is that Seacourt sees their impact in every element that they as a business effect. This includes their supply chain, so as a printing industry, they take their impact all the way back to forestry they use for their natural resources. They consider how trees are transported to the papermill, how papermills are run, the energy this it is run on and much more! They consider the end-of-life process by producing a natural material that has a massive recycling rate. So, when you wrap all of this up in its entirety, Seacourt has created a concept called Planet Positive Thinking -which means that they give back more carbon into the atmosphere than they are responsible for consuming.   Seacourt’s journey to understanding their carbon footprint A lot of businesses are new to the concept of Net Carbon Zero. So, let’s find out how Seaco