Sustainability Archives - Weedon Direct

Posted on March 29, 2022June 12, 2024 by Louie Gough-Littlewood

Avoid Plastic Packaging Tax with Sustainable Cardboard Packaging

The Plastic Packaging Tax seeks to encourage the use of recycled plastics and other less environmentally damaging materials, by imposing a tax on plastic packaging manufactured in the UK and also on any packaging imported into the UK, whether as “wholesale” packaging, or as part of the purchase of a product.

As the Plastic Packaging Tax comes into force on 1st April 2022, any business producing or importing plastic packaging will be charged a rate of £200 per tonne on any plastic packaging that’s deemed to be chargeable.

Why switch to cardboard packaging?

A recent survey discovered that UK consumers are willing to act if they don’t think a retailer is doing enough to become more sustainable. 42% of UK consumers would consider avoiding a retailer if they were not trying to reduce their use of non-recyclable packaging. The collection and UK recycling rates for cardboard and paper-based packaging are higher than any other packaging material (85%).

We manufacture our packaging with 100% recyclable FSC Certified materials and additional features such as peel & seal tape are also recyclable and sustainable to our planet.

With this in mind, in addition to the PPT tax coming into force from April onwards, there is no better time to avoid the plastic tax bills and switch to sustainable cardboard packaging today.

For more guidance on the plastic packaging tax, visit the government website here: Plastic Packaging Tax – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

Posted on March 24, 2021May 29, 2024 by Louie Gough-Littlewood

Sustainability tips for Easter

Springtime is a time of rebirth and regeneration for nature, but it can also be a time of unnecessary waste during the Easter holiday. Luckily, becoming more sustainable for our planet doesn’t mean you have to stop enjoying your chocolate treats or reducing the consumption of food this Easter. Instead, we provide you three sustainable solutions that can remarkably help reduce the impact of our environment, whilst digging into some tasty treats!

1. Indulge in palm oil free Chocolate

Palm oil is a vegetable oil sourced from oil palm trees, used as a cheap substitute in packaged foods. Harvesting palm oil has resulted in widespread deforestation, primarily in Indonesia and Malaysia. In turn, this has left elephants, orangutans and rhinos on the brink of extinction.

It is estimated that 98% of Indonesian forests will be gone in 5 years. As well as driving species extinction, deforestation on this scale is releasing huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, contributing directly to climate change.

Unfortunately, it is estimated that 50% of the products on our supermarket shelves include palm oil. However, one of the more popular Easter treats, chocolate, can be consumed free from palm oil. Whitakers have been providing us high-quality chocolate for over 130 years. Even better, every single chocolate Whitakers make are with palm free oil!

Treat yourself or someone special to a ‘Happy Easter’ (Palm oil free) chocolate bar!

Happy Easter Milk Chocolate Bar (9 0 g) | Whitakers Chocolates

2. Compost Eggshells (Reduce your food waste)

Easter time means more eggshells lying around than usual. This Easter find alternative disposal methods for your food waste. For example if at home, you can compost eggshells, along with many other foods, to eventually produce soil to be used in your garden. If you don’t have space for a compost heap, ask your local council for a food waste bin.

Alternatively, why not introduce your business to a specialist food waste collection and disposal service. Grundon Waste Management offer a dedicated food waste service where collected food waste is sent to Anaerobic Digestion (AD) facilities. At the AD facilities, naturally occurring organisms break down the food waste to produce biogas, which is then converted into renewable electricity and fed into the National Grid; in addition to providing fertiliser which is used for agriculture and land regeneration.

This specialist process results in dramatically reducing our carbon footprint, allowing us to all become more sustainable for our planet.

Read more on how Grundon can reduce your carbon footprint and your costs.

Food Waste Collection & Recycling – Grundon

3. Avoid Egg-cessive packaging

We love packaging – but we know you can have too much of a good thing!

Did you know that each year, more than 8,000 tonnes of waste is generated just from Easter egg packaging and cards alone?

Using unnecessary materials & causing excessive waste is a big concern regarding the protection of our planet. With our right-sizing process we make sure our customers minimise packaging without compromising the performance or protection of your product.

Read more on our packaging reduction process.

Packaging Reduction – Weedon Group – Packaging Solutions

Posted on March 12, 2021August 25, 2023 by Louie Gough-Littlewood

Sustainability tips for Mother’s Day

It’s that time of the year where we show how much we love, care & appreciate our mums.

However, due to covid-19, things might pan out a little different this year. Every year, ranging from cards to roses, there are many gifts sent out to mums around the world at this time of the year. However, the downside to this, is that this results in huge amounts of CO2 emissions, paper and plastic packaging waste, often sent to landfill. This sounds like a negative response to Mother’s Day, but in actual fact there is no better opportunity than this year to even just consider an eco-friendlier gift to help protect our planet.

Here are some of our sustainable tips for you for Mother’s Day.

1.Ditch the Mother’s Day cards

Did you know that one greetings card produces an estimated 140g of carbon dioxide? This is a huge amount considering that billions of cards are sold worldwide every year. Unless you are extremely sentimental, you probably throw your cards away, or at least store them in a drawer that you only open once in a blue moon.

During covid-19, there has been a huge shift towards online e-commerce and particularly when discussing Mother’s Day cards, e-commerce has helped offer an eco-friendlier alternative to replace paper cards this year. There are now are several online eCard sites available that allows you to personalise & design your own paperless card. In addition to this, a paperless card means no impact on our environment!

If you are someone who has always sent a paper card & appreciates the physical presence of giving your mum a card, then why not make one yourself? A handmade card would be just as meaningful and thoughtful to design one yourself, which again would also play its part in reducing the damaging impact on our environment.

2. Homemade jewellery

Most mother’s love jewellery. What better way to show appreciation of your mum on Mother’s Day by sending her a handmade personalised jewellery gift? Although these types of shops may be closed on your local high-street, there are a number of online handmade jewellery gift shops. A number of these handmade jewellery stores are highly ethical for the environment, with recyclable materials and eco-friendly gift jewellery/ gift boxes.

3. Eco-friendly flowers

Again, with your local florist most likely in temporary lockdown due to the pandemic, there are plenty of e-florists open online. Additionally, some of these e-florists offer eco-friendly flowers, that look just as beautiful as normal ones, but also help reduce the impact on our environment.

Eco-friendly & fair-trade flowers have a lower carbon footprint, use less water and protect our environment.

4. Reusable Coffee Cup

If your mum is a coffee lover then this would be a perfect gift this Mother’s Day. On average, over 7 million single use coffee cups are consumed each day worldwide. That equated to approximately 2.5 billion per year, at huge costs both financially and environmentally. A reusable coffee cup helps save the disposal of non-recyclable coffee cups that your mum may get through regularly.

5. Eco-friendly soaps

Natural handmade soaps protect the environment from poisoning it with the toxic chemicals contained in normal soaps. An eco-friendly company called Friendly Soap make their soaps using the cold process method ensuring all soap bars are kind to the skin & easy on the earth. Visit the friendly soap website for more products as they currently have a wide range of soaps perfect for a Mother’s Day gift this year!

Handmade soaps | Natural & clean beautifully with a velvety smooth lather. (friendlysoap.co.uk)