Everyone talks about their “carbon footprint.” Here at Meyer Corporation, U.S., the home of PotsandPans.com, we are trying to do something about it.

Every item that moves from one place to another, anywhere in the world, affects the environment. The phrase “carbon footprint” expresses an attempt to measure the impact that an activity has on the environment, particularly as it relates to energy consumption and climate change. This concept is important to us at PotsandPans.com because our e-commerce site is based on shipping. We must use transportation fuel, in the form planes, trains and trucks to ship orders to our customers, and each expenditure of energy adds greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, which incurs a cost to the environment.

Now, by participating in the carbon neutral program put together by UPS®, the world’s largest package delivery company, PotsandPans.com is the first mail-order or e-commerce site in the kitchen products industry to cover the cost of the carbon offsets purchased on our behalf when we ship an order to our customers. We want to repay, or mitigate, those costs because we want a greener planet and a healthier world. We are not charging our customers, and are not passing those costs along in any way.

We are supporting designated eco-friendly projects in the UPS program that help make clean energy more affordable, prevent “the bad stuff” from being released into the atmosphere, or help keep “the good stuff” right here. By reducing future greenhouse gas emissions that would be made in certain areas, we help to make up for the fuel that’s used in our shipping process. In general, targeted projects focus on reforestation, renewable energy (wind, solar, biomass, hydroelectric), methane and landfill gas destruction, wastewater treatment, and destruction of industrial pollutants. The UPS projects include support for the Garcia River Forest in California (Redwood forests store more carbon per acre than any other forest type), La Pradera Landfill Gas in Colombia and Fujian Landfill Gas in China (enabling efficient landfill gas management that prevents methane from being released into the atmosphere,) and Chonburi Wastewater Gas in Thailand.

PotsandPans.com’s on-line cookware store and culinary resource center helps to mitigate the climate impact of air and ground shipping by automatically paying a “carbon neutral fee” to UPS for each customer order shipped within the United States. Other companies are participating in the UPS carbon neutral program. However, PotsandPans.com is the first kitchen products company to pick up the tab for its customers, voluntarily paying the cost of mitigation for the “carbon footprint” that is created each time an order ships. This fee is calculated based on the size and weight of the package, the transport distance, the type of transport (ground versus air), and other variables established by UPS.

Meyer Corporation, U.S., is the largest cookware company in the country, and feels privileged to contribute to this environmental effort on behalf of all of its PotsandPans.com customers, and hopes that this action might spark other e-commerce and mail-order companies to follow suit.

 

Meyer’s Green Team works to implement programs that meet the goals outlined in our Green Vision Statement, namely to protect the environment through conservation, recycling, and alternative energy solutions. Other types of energy, like solar and wind power, do not contribute to climate change, and Meyer Corporation, U.S., uses these and other new technologies to institute innovative, environmentally-friendly practices and policies in the workplace. Key initiatives include:

• 30,000 tons of recycled asphalt pavement and recycled steel in the construction of our new land-saving vertical plan warehouse facility in California;
• Solar energy in all California facilities
• Product packaging reductions and recycling of paper, shrink wrap, plastic and cardboard
• Motion sensor lighting
• Reuse of filtered waste water
• Eco friendly cleaning products

In these ways, Meyer U.S. is reducing its immediate impact on the environment of its operations base in the San Francisco Bay Area of Northern California and on the planet as a whole. With this additional effort to mitigate the impact of shipping orders by purchasing carbon offsets, there are even more ways we will be “Going Green at Meyer” every day.

For further information on the UPS carbon neutral program, visit ups.com/carbonneutral.