01732 759725 26 BUSINESS UPDATE Innovating for success Michelle Ryder talks to Peter Cowan, Group Chief Operations Officer at Data Direct about some of the company’s newest initiatives for dealers and its strong focus on sustainability Sustainability is at the forefront for Data Direct, in addition to a strong focus on reducing the environmental impact within its own operations, it has just launched a brand new zero waste recycling program - Simply Recycle – that partners can offer to their customers. This specialist solution for raw material recovery sees used OEM and compatible print and copier consumables collected from customers, once returned the items are sorted with all plastic and metal components separated and cleaned ready for re-use. With zero waste to landfill, the service also sees ‘unusable’ recovered plastics diverted to make new products. The program is compliant with HSE recommendations to remove contaminants prior to shredding, dismantling, destroying and recycling, and end customers also receive Waste Transfer Notes to provide an audit trail of all returns. Closed loop “It’s important to point out that everything stays in the UK, we’re eliminating the negative impact of exporting and sending waste to landfill, it’s a complete closed loop,” Cowan explained, adding: “What’s really interesting is that we’re giving single-use plastics a second life, we are disassembling components and producing recycled materials for other UK manufacturers in other industries, so for example a used toner cartridge could come back recycled as street furniture, bollards, or something else. “In the past, dealing with waste toner bottles always posed a problem, because they are so messy, now we can take them back, empty them and recycle them, and we sell them as one of our recycled/remanufactured products,” he added. Take up of the service has been really good. “We only sell through our channel, never direct to end-users and everything we do is designed to add value to and support our partners. While this initiative improves Data Direct’s CSR it also gives our dealers a tangible, audit trail-compliant CSR service offering to their customers. We’re not making any claims that we can’t back up and the dealers like that, they really don’t have to do anything and they have a real value-add offering that they can talk to their customers about.” Cowan continued: “Not too many years ago, it was enough to tick the ‘have you got a sustainability policy’ box on a tender and move on to the next question. Now sustainability carries about 40% of the weighting, so it’s really important to be able to deliver.” Reducing environmental impact Internally, Data Direct has made huge inroads in reducing its environmental impact. Close to 100% of packaging boxes are recycled and recyclable, the company has switched from a traditional vinyl tape to paper-based packing tape, which is made from recycled materials and is recyclable, and is reducing bubble wrap and investigating other sustainable packaging solutions. The company also subscribes to Evertreen, an app that enables it to monitor how many trees it has planted and the amount of carbon it is offsetting. To date, Data Direct has planted 3,000 trees and offset 2.7 million tonnes of CO2. “Last year, we have also achieved Bronze for the EcoVadis global sustainability award,” Cowan said. “We just fell short of Silver and I’m in the process of completing a fresh application and I’m optimistic that we will earn a higher rating.” Exclusive distribution deal In addition to keeping sustainability Peter Cowan
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