Firms Pledge To Help Vital Reforestation Projects And Protect Rainforest

National law firm Irwin Mitchell has teamed up with supplier Red-Inc to launch their first ever Christmas card recycling scheme.

For every 200 cards colleagues across Irwin Mitchell’s 13 UK offices collect, Red-Inc will arrange for a tree to be planted in Caledonia, Scotland. In addition to this, for every 400 cards collected an acre of rainforest overseas will be protected through the Rainforest Trust.

Red-Inc will collect and count all of the cards donated by Irwin Mitchell at the end of January, before recycling them into new paper and card products.

The initiative forms part of Irwin Mitchell’s commitment to making a positive impact by educating its workforce on environmental issues and ways to be greener.

Having plenty of trees and woodland areas is vital to helping reduce climate change, prevent flooding, reduce soil erosion and providing homes to wildlife.

Figures suggest that only 13% of the UK's total land area is covered in trees, compared with an average elsewhere in the EU of about 35%. And, tropical deforestation accounts for up to 15% of net global carbon emissions each year, contributing to rising temperatures, stronger storms, more severe droughts and rising sea levels caused by climate change.

Expert Opinion

While e-cards or posting season’s greetings on social media are great alternatives, there is still a huge amount of us who send and receive cards at Christmas.

We hope that by introducing this scheme we can make sure that as many cards as possible are recycled through Red Inc and in exchange we’ll be helping vital reforestation projects at home in the UK and abroad.
Sarah Ball - Director of Operations

Founder of Red-Inc, Adam Huttly said it was an exciting project for us to be working on with Irwin Mitchell.

He added: “It embraces our values and ethos around assisting clients and reversing where possible, any impact on the environment that we as businesses have. This partnership project also demonstrates the results of collaboration and best business practise which can be achieved when the desire is there to do so.

“Our Red-Inc Foundation will allocate the funds to two projects that we currently run as a part of our sustainable stationery business model; UK reforestation and worldwide legal protection of vital rainforests.

“We look forward to reporting back on the net results of this project to see what we have achieved together.”