GF Smith

With over 135 years of experience making and curating papers, G.F Smith are an established paper-maker who work in partnership with brands, creatives, designers and specialist businesses. The services they offer includes everything from envelopes and packaging, through to embossing, duplexing, greetings cards, labels and more – supplying to clients across the globe.

G. F Smith are committed to sustainability, and continually looking for new ways to advance their environmental credentials. Their papers already have a low environmental impact, with many products also carrying specific environmental accreditations.

As part of their sustainability goals, the client was pursuing B Corp certification. Certified B Corporations – also known as B Corps – are companies that are verified by B Lab to meet high standards of social and environmental performance, transparency and accountability.

The Challenge

While G.F Smith was making great progress on sustainability – they needed some hard data to inform their decision making and measure their progress as they pushed towards carbon reduction.

The company didn’t have a clear picture of its carbon footprint or environmental impact – essential for benchmarking their status and helping to identify areas where they could improve to achieve their sustainability goals. Having access to this data was also essential for gaining B Corp status.

Gathering and managing this data manually simply wasn’t feasible – so they went looking for a specialist solution.

The Solution

After being referred to us we examined G. F. Smith’s current operations and recognised they would benefit from access to our full software package.

Taking into consideration G. F Smith’s inexperience in this area, we wanted to make this as easy as possible. We included data inputting and management as part of the package – providing a full service solution that left them with full visibility over all the key emissions data, and valuable insights.

The Results

G.F. Smith now have an accurate, real-time picture of their Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions – right down to meter level. By taking their spend data and transforming it into emissions data for the past two financial years, we were able to give a thorough picture of their Scope 3 (supply chain) emissions. This has helped them to identify the biggest areas for emissions – giving them the information needed to improve their environmental impact as they push towards a more sustainable future.

Having made huge progress on emissions and environmental tracking – G.F. Smith will now be using AXIOM to undertake the same process with their Social and Governance data.

“We’re committed to decreasing our environmental impact on the world with our continually renewable and natural paper products. We have the ability in the paper industry to be genuinely sustainable.

AXIOM is helping us to measure, track and analyse the impact of our initiatives as we do everything we can to become more sustainably minded for a better future.
We have been delighted with both the AXIOM solution and the AXIOM relationship, having struggled as an SME to find a suitable existing solution in the market. The AXIOM team’s approach to assisting us with data management set up has really helped us turn a big project into a manageable one.”

Gareth Sheekey
Managing Director, G.F Smith