SUSTAINABILITY
Making sustainability the priority
Sustainability continues to be a core focus in the cleaning industry, and businesses need to adapt to meet carbon and waste reduction targets and reassure increasingly environmentally-conscious consumers. Joel Quick, Sustainability Manager at Northwood Hygiene Products, believes it starts with the right products and processes.
When it comes to washrooms, businesses can make many easy improvements to help to reduce their carbon footprint and meet their ESG commitments. From choosing sustainable products and minimising waste to working with responsible suppliers, washroom hygiene strategies can add up to significant change.
Closing the loop
A circular economy is a closed-loop system aimed at eliminating waste and preserving the earth’s resources. It prioritises the re-use of materials, prevents the over- extraction of natural resources and reduces the number of useable materials that end up in landfill. It’s a resilient system that’s good for people, business and the environment.
Where washrooms are concerned, businesses can adopt this approach by using products that are part of the circular economy.
So, for example, instead of disposing of used paper hand towels from washrooms, these towels can be collected separately and recycled to make new material for the production of new hygiene paper. As well as significantly reducing waste, using this type of paper towel also minimises the need for fresh pulp fibre.
Paper solutions
Worldwide, the pulp and paper industry is the fifth largest consumer of energy, accounting for 4% of all the world’s energy use, so reducing the amount of virgin pulp used can make a significant reduction in deforestation and energy usage.
Northwood Hygiene is committed to achieving zero waste in landfills and our Green Loop closed loop recycling programme has been further expanded to recycle hand towels and part-used rolls. Customers are provided with special recycling bins, which collect the paper waste in the washroom. The paper is then collected and sorted and returned to our paper mills, where it will be recycled into future washroom hygiene products.
As a true UK manufacturer with a domestic supply chain, Northwood is proud to now manufacture more than 95% of its paper products in the UK. We are part of the full circle economy, which means that we are involved throughout the supply chain – raw material supply, manufacturing, end user product converting, storage and transportation.
By minimising the import of products from overseas and not transporting raw materials or products unnecessarily in
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the UK, we are also able to significantly reduce the number of miles goods must travel, which means our products are more sustainable.
Less plastic
It takes up to 500 years for plastic to fully decompose, and we use 20 times more plastic today than we did 50 years ago – that’s why cutting our use of plastic and recycling it wherever possible are essential steps to make.
Diverting plastic from landfill is really important, and our Green Loop service now offers dispenser recycling. Under this scheme, we remove old soap and paper dispensers from customer premises and recycle them when customers sign up for our dispensers.
The plastic recovered from the dispensers is then recycled into pellets, which will be used to make new products – all helping to keep plastic away from landfill. Furthermore, as well as being recyclable, Northwood’s Raphael dispensers are currently transitioning to recycled resin across the range.
Embracing a circular economy strategy and using less virgin fibre material hygiene papers in the washroom is a great way to help the environment by reducing waste, cutting down on pollution and preserving our finite resources. Plus, we’re proud to be developing solutions that help to drive industry change.
www.northwood.co.uk x.com/TomoCleaning
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