The challenge
Downstream access provider CFH Docmail offers a hybrid mailing service from a growing number of bases across the UK, including its Radstock HQ and sites in Bath, Slough, Reading and Livingston, Scotland, through its flagship Docmail brand.
Clients email their business documents, which are then printed and sorted at a CFH base and delivered either to a Royal Mail depot for onwards delivery or by bicycle direct to the recipients’ doors, allowing the company to boast what it claims is the third largest end-to-end postal delivery service in the UK.
CFH also offers Velopost, formerly CFH Localpost, a service that gives local firms, such as estate agents, doctors and dentists’ surgeries, schools and retailers, a truly local pick-up and delivery service for mailings that are not sent through Docmail.
This may all sound like your average mailing set-up, but setting the business apart from its competitors is managing director and ardent environmentalist Dave Broadway, who has piloted and implemented measures at Radstock that enable the headquarters to claim near carbon-free operation and he now intends to roll these measures out across the expanding business.
“We want to give customers the option for us to deliver their post in a carbon-free way, or as carbon-free as possible, without using fossil fuels. That option doesn’t currently exist because Royal Mail doesn’t offer it and they are the only ones delivering across most of the country. We hope to roll this out over a wider area than we currently do, so that we can give others the opportunity to cut down on their own carbon footprint,” he says. “This is about doing something real, it’s not just about ticking boxes, that’s just pointless.”
Method
Broadway’s approach to creating a business and a service for customers that has minimal environmental impact has had to be multi-faceted, he explains.
To begin with CFH pays a premium for electricity at its Radstock factory to ensure that all of its energy comes from renewable sources. Paper stocks for Docmail are sourced from sustainably maintained forests while its carbon footprint is measured by the Carbon Trust and new trees – 100,000 to date – are planted by the Woodland Trust to offset usage.
Standard stuff maybe, but then once printed and sorted, the Docmail post is transported to postal depots either by hybrid or electric vehicles, charged using Radstock’s renewable energy sources. And where possible post is delivered to doorsteps by bicycle, creating what Broadway terms the UK’s first fossil fuel-free postal delivery service in the UK.
The fleet of vehicles so far consists of an electric Nissan Leaf and Vauxhall Ampera, hybrid Toyota Prius with plug-in, two Toyota Auris Hybrids and a standard Toyota Prius Hybrid.
Settling on the right bicycles and indeed cycling delivery staff for the Velopost service was a challenge, says Broadway. “We went through some different bike models before we found the right ones and the same can be said of the delivery people. We now have a team of around 25 cyclists in Bristol and Bath, many of whom do it as a second job.
“The secret has been to look for cycling enthusiasts because it is hilly, especially in Bath and to a lesser extent Bristol, and it has taken some quite fit people to do the deliveries. It’s worked well because they are very keen on what they are doing and they do the job properly,” he adds.
CFH is now looking to roll out the full end-to-end service and eventually the local postal service across its Slough, Reading and Edinburgh sites. But Broadway says it won’t happen all at once.
“We will put in the electric vehicles in those areas, to do exactly the same job of moving post to the local depots as well as eventually offering our local pick-up and delivery. We want to get the cycling going at the other sites too,” he notes.
Broadway says a trial run of the end-to-end service has just been carried out at Slough, but that currently in-house volumes are not enough to justify pushing a full roll-out there just yet.
“But we have a major new contract starting there in the new year and that may well push volumes to a level that we can re-evaluate,” he says.
Volumes in Edinburgh, however, are more than adequate to get the service up and running in the first quarter of next year, says Broadway, and once underway he intends to develop the local collection and delivery service as well.
“We need to get better at highlighting all this to our clients,” Broadway says. “Being carbon-neutral is not a prerequisite for many. For some it’s something that’s just nice to have, but for others it’s really important.”
Broadway and his team have worked hard to ensure that every aspect of the Docmail and Velopost services have minimal environmental impact. To do this the company has partnered with the University of the West of England for nearly five years to examine CFH’s energy consumption.
“We looked at how we could change and reduce our usage as well as considering ways of generating our own energy. We looked at biofuels and so on, and burning our waste paper. But unfortunately, the scale of what we’d need meant there would be a huge amount of lorry traffic coming to take away ash and bring woodchips, which would neutralise the impact of everything else we’re doing, so that’s on hold,” explains Broadway. “Instead we’ve focused simply on reducing consumption.”
Results
Through his desire to create a carbon-free business for customers and staff alike, Broadway has not only caught the eye of those customers for whom reducing environmental impact is not just a tick-box exercise. He has also managed to completely overhaul his business’s processes and get his staff on board at the same time.
Energy usage at Radstock has been reduced by 20% since working with the university, says Broadway, by implementing a series of measures, some more radical than others.
“For example,” explains Broadway, “we’ve installed LED lighting, which is 10 times more expensive than standard systems, but pays for itself in 18 months through energy savings. We’ve also consulted with Xerox to make sure the air being heated by our iGens is completely safe, with no by-products, and so we pump that back into the factory during colder months to heat the facility.
“We also carried out experiments with the air pressure that needs to be delivered to the presses to find the minimum we could run at and we’ve built special valves, for example on the Drent, that allow us to run it at lower pressure. Not only that, but our engineers have developed air compressors that use less energy as well.”
The business has already carried out an energy study on the Livingston facility, with measures now being implemented based on the Radstock findings. A similar analysis is set to take place at Slough next year before the site also follows suit.
The continuing good results, buy-in from staff and positive feedback from customers has given Broadway the impetus to press on with his dream of becoming energy self-sufficient at Radstock... for a start.
Next year he plans to install solar panels on two of the factory’s roofs. “It’s a lot of money – around £600,000. It’s cash-neutral for the first six or seven years, but after that it will be cash positive. It’s definitely a long-term investment, but we believe in it,” he explains.
The panels will generate around 500kW of energy on a sunny day, which would be enough to run the factory for a day, according to Broadway.
“Combine that with the electric cars and cycling deliveries and you could say our post is delivered by sunlight,” he says.
CFH DOCMAIL
Vital statistics
Location Radstock (headquarters), Bath, Slough and Livingston, Scotland
Inspection host Dave Broadway, managing director
Size Turnover: £30m; staff: 285
Established By Dave’s father, Geoff Broadway, in 1977 as Continu-forms, a computer stationery printing company
Products Transactional mailing service
Kit Seven Xerox iGens, nine-colour Drent Goebel VSOP plus four other litho presses, two Tamarack four-station highline laminating collators, four Océ continuous-feed MICR personalisation printers, eight Xerox mono personalisation printers, four Pitney Bowes APS + F Series inserting systems and a Pitney Bowes Olympus II Sortation system
Key dates 2007 CFH entered the postal services market, signing a ‘Condition 9’ access agreement with Royal Mail to become a downstream access provider and installing its first mail sortation kit. 2008 CFH launched its hybrid mail service, Docmail, which is now the largest such service in the UK.
2011 CFH launched its own end-to-end postal service
Inspection focus
Creating a carbon-neutral operation from top to bottom
DO IT YOURSELF
Following suit
Broadway says it is vital to first understand what you want to achieve. “Is it a tick-box exercise or do you really want to achieve something? If the latter is the case, what is your ultimate aim? You must understand your consumption so you have to do some studies to find out what your energy is going on and what you may be doing that is not particularly environmentally friendly.” He highlights a white paper produced and published by CFH and freely available to the industry, that details the studies and measures undertaken by CFH to achieve the carbon status it boasts today. “It shows all of CFH’s findings, what measures were implemented and what did and didn’t work. It’s for other printing businesses to look at and use if they want to. This isn’t about gaining competitive advantage, it’s just something that everybody ought to be doing,” he says.
Potential pitfalls
“With things like the deliveries, our problem was finding the right people, committed people. It got easier once we established that we needed people who cycle for a hobby so we now have a great crew, but initially we had a high turnover because we weren’t looking for the right people,” explains Broadway. He says that finding the right bicycles is equally important and was also a case of trial and error, starting with electric bikes, but reverting to pedal power when the electric models “couldn’t stand the pace”.
Top tips
Start with the small things. If it’s energy savings that you want to make then things like LED lights are not a hugely expensive route and will give immediate gains. Then study what else can be changed. “Start with the quick and easy and gradually work towards the big and complex,” says Broadway. “And don’t try to do everything at once across a whole business, especially if you have different divisions.”
Broadway’s top tip
“Live it yourself. You must be personally committed because if you aren’t, you can’t expect the rest of the company to be,” says Broadway. “And you absolutely must know what your goal is before you start.”
