The company specialises in the printing and distribution of disposable paper cups operating out of its European manufacturing facility in Lancashire, England and Ningbo, Zhejiang, China.

The original purpose of this was to promote public hygiene and during the 1918 flu pandemic in the United States paper cups were increasingly used to avoid the spread of infection.

The award was presented to the company in the House of Commons, London, to recognise its achievement in becoming the world’s first organisation to enable its customers to offset the carbon footprint of paper cups.

[5] The company has maintained this environmentally friendly strategy by working with the international Green Earth Appeal[6] and the United Nations Environment Programme[7] by planting a tree in the earthquake-hit island of Haiti for every thousand cups it sells.

[10] The programme centred on individuals who had been made redundant and had remarkably proceeded to establish successful businesses in the North West of England during times of economic hardship.