A Carbon Balanced Business: what does it mean?

If you’ve followed The Cheeky Panda for a while, you MIGHT know that we were the UK’s first Carbon Balanced bamboo toilet paper company back in 2017 (cue round of applause).

If you need a quick reminder what Carbon Balanced means, its when we calculate how much carbon we produce, from manufacturing to shipping and offset that by making donations to a wonderful charity - The World Land Trust -  who use that money to protect the rainforests and plant more trees (because are great at absorbing carbon!).

We are so proud to have been on a Carbon Balancing journey from 2017-2021 but from 2022 we will be onto bigger and better things – Carbon Neutral!

The difference between Carbon Balanced and Carbon Neutral is that Carbon Neutral projects involve purchasing verified carbon units (VCUs) to provide third-party verification for the carbon neutral claim (to put it simply, it means a third party company helps to verify the project that we choose to support). We understand that all these different claims can be confusing, and that’s why we are planning to go Carbon Neutral and to champion the education around this.

We want our customers to be clear on what we do, and why we do it. There’s no greenwashing here and we won’t try and confuse you by using big, complicated words. We are seeing more and more companies now commit to becoming Carbon Neutral with Apple pledging to achieve this by 2030 and Amazon by 2040.

Donations to Carbon Neutral programmes go to protect our carbon sinks. A carbon sink is an environment that can absorb large amounts of CO2, like the ocean, or forests. Ocean are considered the main natural carbon sink as they are capable of absorbing about 50% of carbon in the atmosphere, impressive, but maybe don’t think about that next time you are swimming in the sea.

At end of 2022, once we know exactly how many loo rolls and wet wipes we’ve sold to you lovely lot, we will calculate what carbon emissions we produced and offset that. We will keep you updated on our progress and let you know what exciting carbon sink we will be helping to protect in the future.

Bye for now!