Derwent Acts to Protect Environment

There is increasing pressure on responsible manufacturers to reduce their impact on the environment. Our new factory is situated in one of the most beautiful parts of England, on the edge of the Lake District National Park. We are therefore probably more aware than most how important it is to protect the world around us.

There is increasing pressure on responsible manufacturers to reduce their impact on the environment. Our new factory is situated in one of the most beautiful parts of England, on the edge of the Lake District National Park. We are therefore probably more aware than most how important it is to protect the world around us.

One area that is considered extremely harmful to the environment and a major contributor to the depletion of the ozone layer, which scientists believe will result in global warming, is the emission of volatile organic compounds (VOC’s).

At Derwent we have worked hard to find a solution to painting pencils without emitting any VOC’s, and we have succeeded! We now paint our pencils using materials with no VOC content and dry them using UV light. The work we have done over the last few years has earned us the Queen’s Award for sustainable development and we now make all our pencils with this new environmentally friendly coating.

There have been other benefits as well! The old process which used nitro-cellulose coatings and solvent evaporation used to take 1 hour 50 minutes for each pencil to dry. Our new process which uses a ‘light box’ dries a pencil in only 0.3 seconds. 22,000 times faster!

The adoption of this new environmentally friendly process has also caused a change in the process has also caused a change in the appearance of our pencils. The new, non VOC, coatings are transparent and take on the colour of the underlying wood allowing its natural beauty to show through. All our timber is obtained from managed resources but because it is a natural product the colour of the wood varies causing a variation in colour of the pencil barrel.