Charting Popsa's sustainability journey

Small steps, big impact

We’re passionate about creating beautiful, personalised products that capture your memories. As we've grown, we've realised that our impact goes beyond how we make our customers feel – it extends to the environment too.

That's why we’ve embarked on a journey to understand how sustainable we are – and find ways to be better. We've already taken meaningful steps in the right direction, which will ultimately have a significant impact as we continue to grow. We decided to share some of our journey, showcasing our achievements but also being open about areas we aim to improve.

Starting with self-reflection

Before we could implement positive changes, we first needed to understand our environmental impact. Every physical product contributes to carbon dioxide emissions at various stages of its lifecycle – from raw material extraction and manufacturing, to transportation, then use, and finally disposal. Recognising that our most significant impact comes from the production and delivery of our products, this area was our top priority.

In 2022, we conducted a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of all our products, focusing on three key phases to start with: materials, manufacturing, and delivery, creating a Cradle-to-Customer^[1] assessment. Working closely with our suppliers, we documented every material and process in our production and delivery chain. Then using secondary databases, such as Ecoinvent, we calculated the footprint of every single product we produce.

Sustainability landscape

Using this data we were able to calculate our 2022 physical footprint as 933 tonnes of CO₂ equivalent (tCO₂e)^[2] for over a million orders produced and shipped. That's comparable to the annual carbon footprint of 73 people^[3] or the electricity required to power 184 homes^[4] for an entire year. We’ll use this figure as our baseline footprint in order to track our progress.

In 2023, despite Popsa's year-on-year growth, we proudly reduced our physical footprint by 26 tCO₂e, bringing the total down to 917 tCO₂e. This achievement reflects the impactful steps we've already taken, such as transitioning to more sustainable materials and refining our processes.

As we continue to expand, we’ll use carbon intensity based on revenue as our main metric to track our footprint. While our total overall emissions may increase with our growth, this approach ensures that we’re becoming more efficient and sustainable in relation to our size. Our carbon intensity score for 2023 was 43.1tCO₂e/£1m revenue, 3.3 per cent lower than the previous year. We’ll continue to report on this at the end of every year through our yearly Impact Report. You can also track our live carbon footprint and other environmental and social sustainability metrics over on our Sustainability Tracker (updated quarterly).

Bright spots and areas to grow

Conducting an LCA enabled us to determine our yearly carbon footprint and also provided valuable insights into our performance across different areas. It shed light on both our strengths, and areas where improvements are needed, allowing us to start creating a plan of action.

Where we shine

• Plant based: more than 80 per cent of what we produce is made using plant-based paper, super biodegradable and one of the most widely recycled materials on the planet. This helps make our paper an extremely sustainable product. What's more, all paper used in our products is FSC-certified and comes from sustainable sources. This means for every tree used to make paper, another is grown in its place.

• Built to last: while both virgin and recycled paper have their benefits, we opt for virgin paper from FSC-certified sources over recycled paper to maintain superior print quality and ensure stringent control over sourcing. This choice guarantees our products meet the highest print quality while supporting sustainable forestry practices.

• Made to order: all our products are made to order, meaning we only produce what is needed, and nothing is thrown away. We also print everything digitally, which has a lower carbon footprint than other printing methods. While digital printing does consume more energy and ink/toner compared to offset presses, it minimises the use of chemicals, requires less water, and generates less waste compared to offset or lithographic printing^[5].

• Locality: we use local print facilities in each of our global regions, meaning shorter delivery distances to our customers and a lower delivery footprint. We’re working to add more print facilities to improve this further.

Where we strive

• Materials: we found some of our materials have larger emissions associated when compared to more sustainable options, including the plastics we use for Photo Tiles. After extensive testing we switched to using 100 per cent recycled plastic for our Black Photo Tiles, resulting in a 60 per cent lower carbon footprint compared to the previous material while still keeping the quality. Since January 2024 these new Photo Tiles are now in circulation and estimated to save around 24 tCO₂e this year.

• Single-use plastics: we identified the use of single-use plastics in some of our packaging, including shrink wrapping our Photo Books. In March 2023, we conducted a trial to eliminate plastic wrapping for all books produced at our UK and US sites. The initiative proved successful so we can now proudly say all our packaging is plastic free across all our sites. Not only does this prevent around 1.79 tonnes of plastic from ending up in landfill but also avoids an estimated 5.46 tCO₂e from being emitted into the atmosphere each year.

• Renewable energy: although some of our facilities already use 100 per cent renewable energy, we're working closely with our suppliers and energy providers to extend this practice across all our operations.

• Wastage: while we don’t send anything to landfill, we acknowledge that our processes generate a significant amount of paper offcuts and wastage. We're optimising our processes to reduce waste and minimise environmental impact. In August 2023 we successfully eliminated our use of silver halide globally. This significant shift has already resulted in an estimated saving of over 100,000 litres of water from 3.25 million prints, as well as the various chemicals used.

The road ahead

This is just the beginning of our sustainability journey and we're committed to setting ambitious targets to reduce our emissions in line with global climate goals. We'll be exploring everything from more sustainable materials to energy-efficient production processes.

Working with sustainability experts

We were thrilled to announce our partnership with Futureproof, a leading sustainability platform and consultancy dedicated to helping businesses make a positive impact on both people and the planet.

As our sustainability consultants, they helped us navigate the journey towards B Corp certification, using their platform to track our progress and measure our impact. They also support us in calculating our carbon footprint each quarter – an essential step in understanding where we stand and how we can improve.

Looking ahead, we’ll be working closely with Futureproof to build a comprehensive roadmap towards achieving net zero. Sustainability is a complex and ever-evolving landscape, and having Futureproof’s expertise to guide us is proving invaluable.

Achieving net zero

Achieving net zero by 2050 is the ultimate global sustainability goal, but we're committed to doing it the right way. Rather than rush to join the trend, we believe in fully understanding the complexities of our carbon footprint and creating a clear, actionable roadmap to reach net zero. It's not just about hitting a target; it's about making meaningful, lasting changes that truly reduce our environmental impact. We’ll build out this roadmap over the next year, but ultimately we’ll achieve this by doing the following:

1. Offsetting: since the start of 2024 we have been offsetting the footprint for every order we produce. These projects include renewable energy initiatives, clean cookstoves, clean water community programs and forest conservation projects. You can see our progress and some of the projects we have invested in at our live Climate Action page.

2. Reducing: we've already made strides in reducing our footprint by adopting more sustainable materials and refining our processes. With additional initiatives in the pipeline, we're actively developing a comprehensive roadmap to guide us toward achieving net zero.

3. Removing: after we've reduced our footprint as much as possible, our focus will shift towards actively removing CO₂ from the atmosphere. While technologies like Direct Air Capture (DAC) are still developing, they are rapidly advancing and will be vital in the fight against climate change. In addition to this, we’re exploring natural methods of carbon removal and storage, such as investing in blue carbon sinks along coastlines and marine habitats. We're keeping a close watch on these innovations and will collaborate with environmental agencies to begin CO₂ removal efforts in the near future.

By taking this approach, we're ensuring that our journey to net zero is both responsible and effective, setting a solid foundation for a sustainable future.

Sustainable materials and processes

We continue to look at more sustainable ways to manufacture our products. As with our Black Photo Tiles we have now managed to produce a high quality 100 per cent recycled plastic White Photo Tile, which should be in circulation by the end of the year.

Digital footprint

While we've concentrated on reducing our physical footprint, we recognise our digital operations also carry an environmental impact. Our future plans will include exploring the effects of our cloud storage, server hosting, advertising and other digital activities.

B Corp

We believe B Corp is the gold standard of accreditations that align strongly with Popsa’s core values. Popsa is now officially a Certified B Corporation® (or B Corp for short). This reflects our ongoing mission to combine technology, creativity, and responsibility in a way that makes a meaningful impact – not just on our customers, but on our planet and the people around us.

Evolving LCAs

LCAs are intended for continuous improvement, and future updates will incorporate the end-of-life phase, advancing towards a cradle-to-cradle system to fully assess our products' impact throughout their entire lifecycle –  a certification framework that aims to create products and systems that are safe, circular, and responsibly made

Commitment to transparency

Transparency is key in sustainability, so we'll be sharing our progress with you along the way via our yearly impact reports. After all, the memories we help our customers to preserve are meant to be enjoyed for generations to come – and we want to ensure we're doing our part to preserve the planet too. Stay tuned for more updates on our sustainability efforts.