See Your Sustainability Stats

As one of the leading senders of direct mail, an environment-friendly focus will always be a priority for Lob. You can read about our sustainability journey here, which has led us to be the first in the world to provide carbon neutral direct mail across the entire lifecycle for our customers. This was a major achievement for us, and we hope our customers take pride in this as well.

Show me the stats!

You can feel confident you are supporting a company with a strong sustainability mission—and now you can see your direct impact towards this movement. Today we have launched a new feature in the dashboard for all customers to surface your individual contribution to our sustainability efforts.

Behind the scenes

Each form factor leaves behind a forecasted carbon footprint, which is determined from the energy/gases used to cut down a tree, energy to produce it in a print facility, emissions to mail it, and energy for after usage. For example, each postcard emits around 0.031kg of CO2, while each letter and envelope emits around 0.092kg of CO2. It can be difficult to comprehend what these numbers mean exactly, so in the dashboard we have some comparison equivalents to help better paint the picture:

• Gallons of gas consumed
• Year worth of electricity
• Pounds of coal consumed

A carbon offset is the reduction of greenhouse gases to offset the emissions happening somewhere else. These can include planting trees, switching to renewable energy, water and waste management, and more.

At Lob, we take pride in offering you a carbon neutral experience, meaning for the total amount of greenhouse gases emitted, we offset this same amount by our efforts for sustainability:

• We offset emissions across the entire lifecycle: Lob continues to use responsibly sourced raw materials to minimize our footprint as much as possible. We use life cycle assessment (LCA) to analyze the potential environmental impacts of our products throughout their life cycles. We offset what we cannot yet avoid by purchasing vetted carbon offset credits and certify our product through Climate Impact Partners, the leading global framework for carbon neutrality.
• We plant more trees than we use: Since 2018, we’ve planted over a quarter million trees, two for every one that we’ve used in the production of our mailpieces, through our partnership with Eden Reforestation Projects. (Read more about this partnership here.)
• We use responsibly sourced, recycled paper: Lob proudly uses paper stock that contains post-consumer waste (PCW) pulp fiber for all letter and postcard mailings, allowing us to reduce our carbon footprint, save water, power, and reduce waste. All of the printers in our network work with Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified stock paper — paper that is certified for sustainable harvesting and production.

Special thanks

This project was a labor of love from our Spring Hackathon, courtesy of Software Engineers Nick Perri, Beth Qiang, Shanna Murray, and Andrew Guterres. A huge thank you to Solutions Engineer Michael Morgan for bringing this to life for our customers!

Read more on sustainability at Lob here or contact us to learn more.