Launching in April 2009*, Sustainable^® Mail will help you demonstrate your commitment to recycling, sustainability and reduced waste, while saving you money.

Sustainable^® Mail will be available on all variants of Mailsort® (except Mailsort® Light) and for letters and large letters only. Initially Sustainable^® Mail will focus on direct mail and will support the introduction of PAS 2020, the forthcoming environmental BSI standard for Direct Marketing developed by the DM industry and supported by Royal Mail. In the future, we will be looking at how we can adapt Sustainable Mail for other applications of mail.

Our specification for Sustainable^® Mail will be aligned to PAS 2020 and the Royal Mail Wholesale specification, and will give you guidance on how to prepare your mail to minimise your environmental impact.

To benefit from Sustainable^® Mail, you will need to meet one or both of our specification requirements when using Mailsort^®.

The final entry and intermediate levels of the specification and full product details will be available from January 2009.  Download a draft version of the specification here.

* Subject to Postcomm’s 2009 consultation on Sustainable^® Mail

Entry level

• The minimum standard for Sustainable^® Mail.
• Sustainable^® Mail will not permit the use of ‘difficult to recycle’ materials within the mailing (e.g. polywrap).
• To encourage sustainable production the entry level will focus on forest certification schemes (such as FSC) and environmental management systems (such as ISO 140001).
• To reduce waste in the mail stream we will be encouraging mailers to adopt good data practices, such as checking files against the Mail Preference Service (MPS) and the Postcode Address File (PAF).

Intermediate level

• As well as entry level specification, the following requirements must be complied with.
• To increase the recyclability of materials, everything used within the mailing must be recyclable by the majority of local authority household recycling collections. 
• The specification will encourage sustainability in production by ensuring that all glues used are solvent free.
• Customer and prospect data must be checked against one or more ‘deceased’ and ‘gone away’ files no more than 30 days before the data is used.

We recognise that sourcing the permitted materials could raise your production costs. That’s why Sustainable^® Mail provides a price incentive of up to 1.0p per letter.

With prices up to 4.7% below those of standard Mailsort^®, changing your mailing processes to comply with our Sustainable^® Mail specification could make both financial and environmental sense.

1. Calculate the Mailsort price for the service you are using.
2. If you meet the Entry Level specification for Sustainable^® Mail, then reduce the Mailsort price by the amount shown in Table 1.
3. If instead you meet the Intermediate specification for Sustainable^® Mail, then reduce the Mailsort price by the amount shown in Table 2.

Our official specification will be available to download in January 2009. If you have any questions please contact your Account Handler.