Sustainability in Practice
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In 2024, we carried out an assessment of the carbon-dioxide equivalent (CO2e) emissions of our entire business and supply chain, incorporating suppliers, transport, our team , facilities and more.
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We worked with Small World Consulting, environmental consultants based at the Environment Centre at Lancaster University and led by Professor Mike Berners-Lee.
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They estimated that 80% of our CO2e emissions come from the production and supply chain of our products, 11% from delivery to customers and 9% from everything else.
As the vast majority of our emissions come from the supply of our products, we are more focused than ever on ensuring they are as well-made and durable as possible, so that they last as long as possible.
If our customers need to replace products less often it reduces their and our CO2e emissions, because the old saying "buy quality, buy once" applies as much to sustainability as it does to saving money.
One of the main challenges in the hotel industry is that hotels still demand consumable products in single-use packaging, so we offer as many as we can in packaging that is both made from recycled material and is recyclable, as well as bulk or refill alternatives to avoid single-use packaging wherever possible.
We are ready for and supportive of the UK government in banning single-use hotel products like miniature toiletries bottles, as has already happened in the EU and California.
When it comes to the delivery of products to our customers, we work with DPD who have the highest proportion of electric vehicles in its final-mile delivery fleet (3,600 electric vehicles of 10,000 total in the UK) and use cleaner hydrogenated vegetable oil fuel in 95% of its HGVs.
For customers looking to reduce their own emissions, we recommend consolidating purchases into the smallest number of deliveries possible, whether from Out of Eden or any other supplier, as it means fewer journeys to deliver products around the country.
The final 9% of our estimated CO2e emissions account for everything else, so we do our best across a wide range of areas. Our team separate and compact all of recycling, and compost our food waste, meaning that we only need one large wheelie bin for other waste.
Our team benefit from walk-to-work, cycle-to-work and car-sharing schemes, earning extra time off by getting to work more sustainably. For many years we have had solar panels, and more recently we’ve installed electric vehicle chargers and our first heat pump. As a rural Cumbrian business, we even lay our hedgerows and built a bat house to support local biodiversity.
If you are interested in learning more about sustainability, in particular how to reduce CO2e emissions, we highly recommend visiting Small World Consulting’s website www.sw-consulting.co.uk, where they have a personal carbon footprint calculator, and reading Professor Mike Berners-Lee’s book “How Bad Are Bananas?”, in which he evaluates the emissions of almost everything.
