Royal Mail Letters Carbon Calculator
Royal Mail Letters Carbon Calculator
As a business we’re committed to responsibly managing our impact on the world and having a positive relationship with our customers, our people, our communities and our environment.
We are proud to have already taken steps towards Net Zero emissions, enabling us to be the UK’s greenest* option for letter and parcel delivery.
Many of our customers rely on marketing to deliver growth and letters play an important role in achieving this. But all media has a carbon footprint. As the owner of the letters channel we want to encourage more sustainable marketing so we’ve launched a new carbon calculator to help you do this.
We work with Climate Impact Partners, specialists in carbon market solutions for climate action, to allow you to calculate and offset carbon emissions associated with mail distribution. Offsetting through Climate Impact Partners also means you’ll support high quality carbon reduction projects that deliver value for the environment, your business and local communities.
For more information read our FAQs below or start using the calculator now.
*We offer the lowest reported emissions per parcel of any major UK delivery company.
We are working hard to reduce our direct emissions of mail. However, at the moment, there is no way for us to conduct our business without creating some emissions.
While we work to reduce these emissions, we believe it is also important for us to provide a facility for our customers to mitigate climate impact of their mail usage now, and we are doing this by providing the offsetting calculator and projects that supports communities around the world.
Offsetting is the mechanism through which organisations can take responsibility for carbon emissions generated by their business activities, that are difficult or impossible to avoid. It operates like a seesaw, with carbon emissions balanced by equivalent emissions reductions delivered by projects in the developing world.
Climate change is one of the most serious threats facing global society. We all need to make every effort to reduce our carbon footprint as much as we can, and we can choose to offset the emissions we can’t reduce.
Offsetting tackles climate change by:
- making real reductions in amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere that would not have happened otherwise;
- providing funds for renewable technologies and energy efficient solutions; and,
- raising awareness of the impact that our lifestyles have on the climate, encouraging us to do more to reduce our carbon footprint.
We work with our expert partner Climate Impact Partners, to choose robust, high-quality projects that deliver emission reductions alongside sustainable development impacts.
Many of these projects are currently in the developing world. This is because the Kyoto Protocol dictated the locations of carbon reduction projects. This has now changed, giving scope for us to support projects in a wider range of locations in future, as they come online.
Yes. Our projects follow the same robust process of design, monitoring and independent verification set down by the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). They also meet a recognised international standard for emission reductions. Climate Impact Partners develop projects to comply with the CDM, Gold Standard and Verified Carbon Standard.
Their work has played an important role in the development of the voluntary carbon market and their project principles have widely influenced the debate about what counts as a valid carbon offset. Climate Impact Partners continually campaigns for high standards in the industry.
The money provided to offset emissions from Royal Mail’s delivery of mail will support a portfolio of projects around the world that cut global carbon emissions including how it reduces emissions and other social impacts it produces.
All the projects are certified to the highest possible standards within the carbon market to ensure that the emissions reductions are real and verified.
Our projects follow the same robust process of design, monitoring and independent verification set down by the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism. This means that carbon reductions are measured against a baseline and independently verified by an international standard for emission reductions.
All of the projects we support consult with local stakeholders before the project is implemented and get feedback from local communities about how the project is impacting them on an ongoing basis. In the great majority of projects, local communities are instrumental in running the project. In addition, Climate Impact Partners is an award-winning project developer and ensures that high standards for project implementation are maintained on the ground. They monitor all of the projects they work with, to make sure that the project is benefiting local communities.
Climate Impact Partners are the UK’s leading carbon offset provider. Climate Impact Partners deliver high impact programmes to tackle poverty, improve health, and protect the environment, and have more than 20 years’ experience as a leader in the global carbon markets and climate change sector. Climate Impact Partners also advises on a range of climate change mitigation and adaptation subjects, from large scale implementation to national climate change policies.
We choose to work with Climate Impact Partners because of their reputation as expert providers of climate neutral solutions for private- and public-sector organisations. Their core mission of improving lives and tackling climate change aligns strongly with our ethos and we’re delighted to be partnering with them to deliver our carbon offset programme