Pollards International, est. 1895, and Talbots Group, est. 1913, are both widely respected jewellery packaging brands with long- standing histories, bursting with tradition and craftsmanship. However, towards the end of 2022 you will witness these impressive companies joining forces, enabling us to offer a much broader and more eco conscious range of products. This newly combined entity will be known as Pollards & Talbots.
As the freshly merged Pollards and Talbots, we will be launching our new products at the ‘UK Jewellery Festival 2022′, on the 1st September at the Hilton London Metropole, London. Along with our exciting jewellery packaging products available for you to peruse, our sparkling Pollards & Talbots catalogue will also be making its debut at the Jewellery Festival. This catalogue will detail the carefully curated five distinct capsule collections on offer: Sustain, Premier, Luxury, Wood and Accessories.
Pollards & Talbots will be putting a sustainability ethos at the core of the business, ensuring that all the products we offer are made from recycled materials, but still exude that premium quality that customers have come to know and love from each of these brands respectively. This ethos is also reflected in our attitude towards our catalogue, with it being printed on fully recycled and fully recyclable FSC paper. It will also actually be our last ever mass-printed catalogue, as going forward we look to embrace digital catalogue formats, to ensure all our communications help to spread a concise corporate social responsibility message.
This sustainability focus is hugely benefitted and supported by the same progressive values of our independently owned, parent company Millmead Optical Group.
Moments of Success
A key moment of success for us is linked to one of our most prominent customers, whom we supply with jewellery packaging for their in-house brand, and this includes a new sustainable range created from recycled materials. The boxes in this sustainable range are covered with recycled paper, constructed from recycled card and the interior uses recycled cotton. The accompanying fabric pouches to this collection are made from recycled Polyethylene Terephthalate (rPET i.e., recycled plastic), which also helps compliment the sustainable credentials of the whole packaging solution.
This client of ours has a widespread presence across the UK and throughout the international market, and their switch to our fully recycled packaging even resulted in their nomination for a sustainability award. We have calculated that our supply of this sustainable range to this client alone will result (in 2022) in a reduction of 112,000 kw of energy, which is the equivalent of 13 homes’ average annual electricity consumption. It also saves 1,288 gallons of oil and reduces our carbon footprint by 79.2 tonnes of CO2. We see this as a fantastic, prominent example of how the forward-thinking actions of just one of our key customers, can help in the global battle to place the future of our environment at the heart of manufacturing and supply processes.
About Millmead Optical Group
Demonstrating the aim of sustainability being at the businesses core, we are awaiting final confirmation on our B Corp Certification, which was awarded in principle earlier this year in March 2022. Our ‘Sustainability Report’ is circulated to new customers and highlights the ways in which we operate, such as consolidated ordering to save on packaging, our adoption of fully recycled transportation packaging and the move towards production of 100% recycled products which are manufactured onsite in our Liverpool factory. In addition, our innovative fold-flat products reduce the reliance on raw materials and transportation costs.
We have introduced a plethora of new business practices, which included the appointment of our Health & Safety and Compliance Officer Graeme Hasson, as our ‘Sustainability Champion’ in June 2021. Graeme has helped to implement a broad range of fantastic initiatives across the business, such as:
- The replacement of all single-use plastic bottles with reusable stainless steel water bottles for all staff- with the manufacturer pledging to plant 5 trees for each bottle made.
- The upgrade of our factory windows to the most energy efficient, to help reduce our carbon footprint.
- Transitioning to LED lighting throughout our office spaces.
- The installation of an onsite waste compacting unit, which has helped to reduce our waste output by almost 90%.
Graeme also enrolled Millmead Optical Group as a ISCC Association Member. Objectives of the membership includes supporting production, the processing and utilisation of sustainable feedstocks in the context of the ISCC system, and thereby contributing to climate protection along with ecological and social sustainability.
We are also in the beginning stages of a thrilling project, in which we are working with leading Sustainability Designer, Yair Neuman, to create a visually beautiful and though- provoking sculpture, made from the lens waste (commonly known as swarf) from our Liverpool factory.
We wanted to create this piece of art to express how the optical industry needs to make these strides towards a sustainable path in reducing waste production and to help shine a light on the ways in which we can all do this. This sculpture piece will be unveiled to the public in September 2022.