December 14, 2021 Reanne Duffy

Menzies Distribution was designing and implementing sustainable practices in its business long before sustainability’ became a recognised imperative. Now, with help from Aura Brand Solutions and Metamark, Menzies is making its industry-leading best-practices better still…

 

Menzies Distribution can claim almost two centuries of supply chain expertise, having put down roots in the early 1800s. That’s a number that gets attention. So too does the deeper range of statistics describing the business. Menzies Distribution operates from more than 100 sites across the UK and Ireland, distributing over 29.5 million units across its network every week, to more than 30,000 locations each day, including newspapers and magazines, retail stock, healthcare consumables and parcel delivery services. Employing almost 5,000 people and operating with over 4,200 vehicle assets.

 

An industry leader and innovator, Menzies has been recognised for its commitment to, and delivery of, socially responsible and sustainable practices. Menzies has been recognised by its peers for its commitment to socially responsible and sustainable practices. In 2020, the business won sector awards for ‘Most Innovative Business of the Year’ and in 2021 it won What Van Magazine’s Green Fleet of the Year, The Supply Chain Excellence Sustainability Award and Logistics UK’s Green Fleet Van Operator of the Year, along with Van Operator of the Year.

 

Menzies’ impressive performance meets its alter-ego in the shape of all the road-miles its fleet needs to travel in order to do its job, and the corresponding environmental impact. Menzies though has been attending to its environmental responsibilities since the 1800s, and today its focus is directed on three main areas in order to make its business more sustainable. To that end, the Menzies fleet is subject to continual review and improvement, the group’s energy consumption is key, and reuse and recycling is a major factor too with the company moving beyond the ‘make, use and dispose’ paradigm and driving the emerging circular economy.

 

Menzies’ efforts on the innovation front are producing benefits that halo the company’s environmental objectives. The company’s Route Optimisation initiative has dramatically reduced the road miles covered by its fleet and some 260,000 of road miles travelled by Menzies vehicles are already emission free and wider electrification of the fleet is gathering pace.

 

Part of Menzies’ environmental policy involved a review of the materials used in the provision of fleet livery graphics. Leading UK specialist in the field, Aura Brand Solutions, was able to advise. The timing was opportune. Aura Brand Solutions had been engaged with Lancaster UK based materials manufacturer, Metamark, in testing and developing MetaStream a new initiative focussed on providing attractive recycling option for a wide range of proven Metamark materials.

 

The MetaStream process enables the delivery of a circular recycling route for qualified Metamark materials used, among other commercial applications, for fleet livery. The process works with a range of qualified Metamark materials long proven in fleet vehicle livery production, and well known to major converters and fleet specialists such as Aura Brand Solutions. Metamark uses the MetaStream process itself as part of its Zero To Landfill initiative dealing with already low levels of production waste.

 

MetaStream admits as its input printed and coloured films recovered and consolidated by the fleet livery producer, and outputs useful articles including traffic cones and other road-work furniture, fence panels and barrier footings among other things. These articles can themselves be recycled time and again. MetaStream keeps a high-quality and very useful material out of landfill or incineration streams and presents a genuinely circular recycling route. The process also recycles the materials’ liner papers post-production too.

 

Aura Brand Solutions presented the MetaStream programme to the team at Menzies and it was agreed that, given the Metamark materials’ proven legacy and warranty, and the end-of-life options enabled by MetaStream, that liveries supplied and installed by Aura Brand Solutions would be made from MetaStream qualified Metamark materials. 

 

The Menzies livery was first produced in ‘draft’ using MetaStream-Ready printed material from the Metamark’s digital media portfolio by the Aura Brand Solutions team and, when approved by Menzies, colour-matched materials were produced by Metamark for livery production. All materials used were fully qualified for inclusion in the MetaStream process and will be recycled when eventually recovered.

 

Aura Brand Solutions supplied Metamark with a roster of its material requirements based on graphic panels sizes and production run lengths needed to produce the required livery graphics without generating the material waste inevitable if standard roll sizes are used. Metamark manufactured the materials and made them available exclusively to Aura Brand Solutions for the Menzies livery.

 

Menzies is the first distribution business to specify MetaStream qualified Metamark materials for its fleet livery graphics and Aura Brand Solutions, already familiar with the process and its end-to-end workflow, is positioned to manage every stage of the livery’s production, installation, eventual recovery and recycling. 

 

In delivering the initial phases of Menzies’ fleet graphics programme, Aura Brand Solutions will have contributed an initial saving of some three tonnes of CO2, or put another way, the output of a couple of cars running around an inner-city for a year - numbers which accrue to the impressive progress that Menzies records around its central environmental policy.

 

Leaders, Menzies and Aura Brand Solutions, have taken a huge stride in a direction that pursues the environmentally responsible use and potentially endless reuse of a valuable material resource. While traffic cones on a motorway may not be the most welcome of sights seen from the cab of one of Menzies’ hard-working vehicles, the knowledge that it may, at one time, have been an Aura Brand Solutions supplied Menzies’ livery, may just brighten the day.