SUSTAINABILITY
A circular approach to sustainability
Joel Quick, Sustainability Manager at Northwood Hygiene Products, talks to us about how the business has made more progress towards sustainability and how they’re helping customers to achieve some wins.
Why does circularity matter to
Northwood? As a leading manufacturer of recycled tissue, our business is all about circularity, so it’s very important to us to do everything we can to preserve our resources and minimise the amount of waste our business generates.
75% of our products are made from recycled paper and all of Northwood’s paper mills now
produce Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified base sheet paper.
What are some of the changes that Northwood has made to become
more sustainable? We’ve made progress in all key areas with significant impact. Firstly, we have invested in a new fleet of lorries, which are more advanced than our previous fleet. We replaced half our fleet in 2023 with plans to replace the remaining half in 2024, plus expansion plans to increase the size of fleet. The new lorries have already helped us to reduce our CO2
8% within our logistics network.
We’ve continued to invest in new converting assets across the business with state-of-the-art technology which is much more energy efficient than its predecessor. This strategy has supported our pledge as a business to reduce our reliance on finished goods suppliers in Europe and we now manufacture more than 95% of our paper products in the UK.
We have made a multi-million pound investment into a new generation heat recovery boiler at our Disley paper mill. This plays a significant role in our Net Zero strategy, utilising waste heat in our operation and ultimately reducing our carbon emissions at the site.
We’ve introduced plastic-free packaging – initially on our Whisper Eco product, with plans to roll this out across other product categories. We’ve also introduced paper and board packaging for our hand towel assortment and removed plastic tape, which has enabled us to reduce plastic by over 67 tonnes a year.
Finally, we’ve extended our sourcing policy to ensure that our supply chain is fully on board with the same sustainability principles as us. This means that all the paper and board goods we purchase, such as labels, boxes and cores, are FSC certified, just like our finished goods.
emissions by What developments have made the
most impact? It has to be the launch of our Whisper Eco product – the first of its kind in the market.
Whisper Eco is a premium, environmentally-friendly 2-ply toilet tissue, which uses FSC certified, sustainably sourced, 100% recycled paper and comes in plastic-free packaging. It is the first toilet tissue in the Whisper range to be wrapped in paper and is the most sustainable toilet roll Northwood has ever produced.
When does Northwood plan to be
carbon zero? We have committed to be there by 2050. We now formally measure our carbon footprint and have an ambitious plan to be better at what we do.
As part of our strategy to reduce our emissions and make a positive step towards sustainability, we are now formally measuring our emissions and are recognised through ISO 14064. This has helped us to understand our carbon footprint and provide a strong framework for managing our future emissions.
We intend to broaden the scope to include the wider 44 | TOMORROW'S CLEANING
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