In response to the Government's calls for producer responsibility for advertising mail, Royal Mail has been involved in discussions with the various trade bodies representing the direct marketing, printing and paper industries, as well as the Local Authority Recycling Advisory Committee and the Government's Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP). As a result the direct marketing sector have proposed a voluntary target to recover 67% of domestic advertising mail by 2015 and a code of practice on producer responsibility will be agreed.

As a distribution company, we also develop a range of packaging solutions, both for our customers and for internal use. Examples include, Self Adhesive Stamps, Re direction envelopes and Safebox. In designing these, we consider environmental impacts and where possible incorporate environmental solutions, such as making them recyclable.

Our activity in this area brings us under the Producer Responsibility (Packaging Waste) Obligations. We discharge this obligation through membership of a packaging compliance scheme.

We've also been working with our internal product developers, to raise awareness of the need to include environmental concerns at the stage of product design and also to look at potential products we could develop that could provide environmental solutions for our customers.