Business as a force for good

At Sprout, we believe that sustainability lives at the heart of a successful business, and that business can be a force for good.

We all need to take action to reduce carbon emissions and contribute to a better way to do business. One of our objectives at Sprout is to inspire other companies to take bold actions and to make profit with a purpose.

We’re on a mission to be carbon neutral by 2022 and carbon negative in 2024, paving the way for Sprout to have only positive impact and to be a Best for the World company.

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A message to the future

We call our products green messengers. That’s our way of saying they’re more than a pencil or makeup pencil – they’re part of a bigger story about how you can enact sustainability in your everyday actions.

Why plant a pencil? For us, it’s more than a gimmick. Our pencils and makeup pencils tell the story of the circular economy, with life cycle analysis charting every point along their journey from production to use and reuse at the end of their lives to ensure they produce as little negative environmental impact as possible.

As a buyer or recipient of a Sprout product, you’re a sustainable ambassador: you can use it in a simple and concrete way to show how sustainable actions can be both manageable and tangible.

Our six key commitments

We’re constantly looking for ways to be greener. To reduce our impact on the environment, we need to understand the truth about our own business. Here’s how we do it:

1. MEASUREMENT

Through our LCA (Life Cycle Assessment), a standardized method to quantitatively assess the environmental performance of a product, we measure our climate footprint all the way through the value chain, reviewing and assessing it through production to use and end of life to continually improve it.

2. REDUCTION

We reduce our emissions as much as possible and we offset the rest through partnerships. We ship our orders through the UPS carbon neutral program, which offsets the emissions of the shipment’s transport and supports climate positive programs. All Sprout packaging is FSC-certified and CO2 neutral.

3. DOCUMENTATION

We document the action behind our words by working with a third party to measure our carbon footprint and our work with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. It’s important that our processes are independently verified. You can read more about our view on supply chain transparency on our blog.

4. RESTORATION

We are committed to protect, restore, and promote the sustainable use of natural habitats. All the wood for our pencils is FSC or PEFC certified, and all our pencils and pencil liners have a second life as a plant or tree. In Europe, all our wood is harvested from the Polish state forest.

5. REPARATION

We don’t just give back – we give more than we have taken. We buy afforested land and plant trees to give back to the Polish forest, replacing what we’ve used and more. We also support habitats and ecosystems by planting additional shrubs and bushes in the forest.

6. VERIFICATION

We seek the highest standards of verified social and environmental performance, public transparency, and legal accountability. Since 2021, Sprout has been a member of SEDEX, one of the world’s leading platforms for managing and improving global supply chains.

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Sprout’s roadmap

The path to sustainability has a lot of steps along the way. We are proud of what Sprout have achieved so far and look forward to the journey ahead.

Transparency & traceability

At Sprout, documenting our work within sustainability is part of our DNA. We are in the process of developing our blockchain, a new technology used to show  complete transparency and traceability in our value chain. It means we’re able to back up our green claims with documentation, keeping data fresh while also maintaining a record of its history. Using it also means our data can’t be corrupted or deleted, giving people inside and outside our organisation a guarantee that the information and data they’re looking at is correct and trustworthy.   

B Corp certified

We are now a B Corp certified business. When you do business with us as a B Corp it’s your guarantee that you can purchase from us with a total peace of mind.
In short, B Corp is about being a business that (apart from making money) also does the best for the planet.
It’s a third-party certification which means that our assessment has been verified by 3. Party, B Lab, the American non-profit behind the B Corp Certification.

Inspired?

Take the path to sustainability with us. We're here to help with further information on any of our products as your move towards your green business goals.