Steps to Sustainable Gold

We are delighted to announce that we have recently been accredited with the EcoVadis Gold standard rating for our sustainable practices. As a producer of glass, an entirely circular material, sustainability is deeply embedded within our company’s ethos so we could not be more pleased with this result.

EcoVadis is the world’s most trusted business sustainability ratings provider, working with over 90,000 companies across 160 countries, within over 200 industries. After applying in 2018 and receiving the silver standard accreditation, we made the decision to work to drastically improve our sustainability credentials to go that extra step further to achieve gold.

We work closely with supply partners as well as working in collaboration with other glass manufacturers and trade federations such as British Glass and FEVE to help drive up recycling rates within the UK. We have transitioned to renewable electricity sources, which has reduced our carbon emissions by 33,000 tonnes and we continue to develop our sites to run in a less energy intensive manner. We are also investing in water recovery and recycling systems to lower our cooling operations impact and have introduced processes which allowed an increase in the recycling of our general waste up to 90% and have reduced waste generated by secondary packaging by 58%.

Notable statistics of improvement made within our sites include:

• 43% increase in post-customer cullet
• 18% fewer raw materials consumed
• 5% reduction in CO₂ per tonne
• 100% of our electrical requirement is now supplied by renewable sources
• 68% reduction in accident frequency

David Kirk – Quality Systems Manager & Head of Decoration said “We are delighted to see that all our hard work has been affirmed by obtaining the gold standard. Sustainability is a big topic sweeping through the industry and it’s important to remember that it effects all our day-to-day lives. We are incredibly proud to be consistently pushing ourselves to be industry leaders and hope to set an example for how the future of glass manufacture should be.”

Enough steps have been taken with the business for us to now have achieved the EcoVadis gold standard accreditation. Within every section of review including, environment, labour and human rights, ethics, and sustainable procurement, we have dramatically increased our score.