Sustainable Promotional Materials

Healthy Planet – Responsible Sourcing of Promotional Materials

Companies with large numbers of products can easily be in a position of printing huge volumes of promotional materials, from small leaflets to large brochures as well as giveaway gifts like pens and mugs!

In order to help fulfill our commitment to reduce our environmental impact under our Healthy Purpose promises, Elanco UK and Ireland are working hard to reduce the amount of material produced and are choosing to purchase more responsible items.

So, what are Elanco UK and Ireland doing?

There are a number of initiatives currently in progress, these include:

Reducing the number of items that are printed – the ideal now is to switch to digital literature for product detailing and promotional items, either through our websites, social media, videos or online events, but anything that needs to be printed will be done in smaller volumes where appropriate, in order to reduce the amount of waste should these items become out of date. Furthermore, we are working with a new printing vendor that will report our carbon emissions on the production of these printed materials.

Switching to recycled paper for printed items where possible – for items that can be printed on recycled paper rather than virgin paper we will commit to choose this option. We are also using seeded paper for items. This paper can be buried once finished with and amazingly blossom into new plants.

Using paper tape for packaging rather than plastic – we requested with vendors where possible to use paper sealing tape. Not only does this reduce use of plastic but it also makes recycling of the used boxes much easier.
Using a warehouse for our promotional materials that has a sustainability policy – we have now moved much of our promotional materials to a storage and distribution supplier that shares our environmental responsibility commitments through their EcoVadis accreditation. We will remove the remaining items from our old supplier at the end July when contractual obligations allow.
Removing single use plastic where possible – items, such as the Tracer Microchip Pet ID Card, have now been replaced with printed card rather than plastic.
Responsible sourcing of promotional items and giveaways – we are working with a number of suppliers to ensure we are making responsible decisions about our clothing, giveaways and gifts. Avoiding unnecessary plastic wrapping, locally manufactured items and recyclable materials will all help reduce our carbon emissions.

There will be more we can do to continually improve our footprint, working with our suppliers as well as exploring more environmentally conscious options, and we are committed to becoming one of the leading pharmaceutical companies with regards to green credentials.