What “carbon-neutral shipping” means

When we say our shipping is carbon neutral, we're talking about logistics. That's the part of getting your toilet paper from where it's made to where you are. It covers four stages:

1. Transport from our manufacturing site to the port of origin
2. International ocean freight (and air freight when used)
3. Inland transportation from the destination port to our local warehouse
4. The final leg from our warehouse to your front door

The emissions associated with each of those four stages are calculated and then matched with verified carbon credits.

What’s not included

The carbon-neutral shipping claim is specifically about shipping. It doesn't cover:

1. The emissions of making the toilet paper itself, like paper manufacturing and pulp production.
2. The energy used to convert paper into finished products.
3. Anything that happens once the product is in your home, like use or disposal.

We work on reducing those other emissions through a separate set of initiatives, which we come back to below. We deliberately don't conflate them with shipping because they're different things and they should be treated separately.

How we calculate shipping emissions

We calculate the carbon footprint of each of the four logistics stages using emission factors published by DEFRA, the UK Government's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. DEFRA's emission factors are the standard reference for carbon accounting in the UK and are updated each year. 

We multiply DEFRA's factors by primary tonnage data (how much product moved through each stage by what mode and for what distance). That gives us our calculated emissions. We then apply a 10% buffer on top, which means the carbon credits we buy comfortably exceed our calculated emissions rather than just meeting them. 

We recalculate emissions every quarter, so the credits we hold are kept in line with the volume we ship.

Who verifies the offsets

Our offset partner is South Pole Australia Financial Services Pty Ltd. South Pole is one of the largest carbon project developers globally and works exclusively with projects that meet independent verification standards. 

The credits we currently hold come from the Selva de Urundel forest conservation project in Argentina. The project is independently verified to the Verified Carbon Standard (Verra), the most widely used international standard for voluntary carbon markets. 

If you've been with us for a while, you might remember we previously sourced offsets through Pachama. When Pachama wound down its credit issuance, we transitioned to South Pole as our primary provider, supported by Sanergy. As of June 2026, South Pole makes up 95% of our offsets, and Sanergy 5%.

Why we use offsets (and why we don’t think they’re the whole answer)

Offsets are a useful tool, but they aren't the only thing we should be doing, and we want to be honest about that. Offsets work by paying for projects elsewhere in the world (usually forest protection or restoration) that reduce or remove carbon emissions and then claiming those reductions against the emissions you're producing. They don't undo our shipping emissions; they work to neutralise the net effect.

The harder truth is that the world needs to reduce total emissions, not just net them down to zero. That means cutting emissions at source in our supply chain before any offsetting comes into play. Offsets are a good way to neutralise the emissions you can't yet avoid, but they shouldn't be a substitute for the harder work of avoiding them in the first place. 

We treat offsets as one piece of a wider strategy. The other piece, source-level reduction, is described next.

Reducing our shipping emissions at source

Alongside the offset programme, we're investing in reducing our shipping emissions directly. The main things we're working on are on-site renewable energy at our warehouse operations, which reduces the carbon intensity of every kilogram we ship, and the introduction of electric vehicle delivery for bulk shipments and the final leg in markets where the infrastructure supports it.

These initiatives sit alongside the Offset Programme. They don't replace it, but they are what we expect to reduce the volume of offsetting we need in future years.

Channel variations

The Offset Programme covers direct-to-consumer orders and business-to-business orders where the product passes through our destination warehouse, which is the part of our supply chain that sits within our operational control. Retail orders go directly from the supplier to a retailer's warehouse, don’t pass through ours, and so they sit outside that operational control boundary. Without the same visibility of routes, modes and tonnage, we can’t measure those emissions to the same standard. We are working to close this gap over time.

What’s coming

The European Union's Empowering Consumers Directive, which comes into effect in September 2026, will limit the use of carbon-neutral claims that rely on offsetting. We support that direction. From September 2026, we will be adjusting how we talk about our shipping carbon to reflect both the rules and the broader regulatory consensus that source reduction needs to be the lead, not offsetting. 

That doesn't mean we're stepping away from offsetting. It means we're making the role of offsetting clearer and the role of source reduction more visible.