The world means the world to us.
Greeting cards mark special moments in people’s lives and many of our cards are kept and enjoyed for years. Our aim is to offer our customers cards that bring joy and respect the environment. This means optimising every stage of our products’ life – from re-thinking our designs and using more sustainable materials to encouraging people to reuse their cards creatively and ensuring that cards can be widely and easily recycled. Ultimately, our goal is for the majority of our products to be sustainable and recyclable, helping to conserve natural resources.
Product innovation
Our history of world-class creativity and innovation is central to the high-quality products and services our consumers enjoy every day. Increasingly, sustainability guides our product innovation journey. We review our product lines constantly to help ensure we keep moving towards recyclability.
Behind the scenes: removing glitter from our products
Glitter adds a touch of sparkle to any card or gift, but it’s also a microplastic and can be harmful to the environment. That’s why we’re reducing glitter on all our product lines and our aim is to be glitter free by 2025. We’re also removing glitter from all-new gift bags in production. Next up: we’re also working on sustainable alternatives for more hand applied attachments on cards as we move to a more sustainable product offer.
Creating sustainable gift wrap
To promote greater recyclability across our product ranges, we’re committed to reducing waste and single-use plastic from our products. This starts with only using fully recyclable ink, varnishes and sourcing Forest Stewardship Council (FSC)-certified paper. Any foil we use is recyclable. We’re also replacing plastic hooks with paper alternatives; we have reduced the use of cello wrap around roll wrap, and we have removed labels on the bottom of gift bags.
Helping to protect endangered habitats: Carbon Balanced Paper
Carbon emissions produced from manufacturing paper and board to produce our single cards (those that are not boxed for example) are now Carbon Balanced through the World Land Trust™. Carbon Balanced paper is achieved through preserving ecologically important standing forests that are under real and imminent threat of clearance.
The World Land Trust™ (WLT), a global conservation charity, works to save threatened habitats by creating protected nature reserves around the world – safeguarding some of the world’s most vulnerable and biologically significant habitats and wildlife.
Projected paper usage during 2021/22, will help to save 635 acres (2,569,210m²) of endangered forest, offsetting 9688 tonnes of CO2.
All John Sands single greeting cards lines manufactured from March 1st, 2021, have been carbon balanced.
“The money that is given to the World Land Trust, in my estimation, has more effect on the wild world than almost anything I can think of.”
Sir David Attenborough
Preventing deforestation how the forest stewardship council® (FSC®) certification protects trees
The world’s forests provide us with food, water, healthy soil, clean air and an important way to capture carbon from the atmosphere. They’re also home to 80% of biodiversity. To help protect our forests and prevent deforestation, we source Forest Stewardship Council® (FSC®)-certified paper and board, and work with suppliers committed to the same high standards. The FSC® works to support suppliers in adopting practices that benefit forests, workers and communities.
Approximately 90% of our products are made using sustainably sourced (FSC®) material with new designs featuring the FSC® logo on the back of the card, providing peace of mind that your card has been created sustainably. This means that any of our cards can be traced all the way back from the shop shelf to the forest that provided the wood pulp to make the card.
Currently in Australia and New Zealand, John Sands is the only vendor in our industry with FSC Certification, closing the Chain of Custody.
On our journey to produce more sustainable products, we could not think of any better partnerships to ensure that our products are not only sustainably sourced, but now help to protect threatened habitats and endangered species.
