We were delighted to be awarded the silver award for Environmental Best Practice on 25 November 2019 and Bryan Edwards, BRITA UK's Professional & Services Warehouse manager took a trip to the Houses of Parliament to collect the award.
When collecting the award Bryan said "We are absolutely thrilled with the award, but for us, the waste journey has not been achieved overnight. You have to have a structure and embrace the waste hierarchy, and to understand how that works you must talk to experts like Grundon Waste Management. Without them behind us we wouldn’t have been able to achieve such improvements. This is not just about selling waste collection services, it is the expertise and knowledge that makes a difference."
Millions of water filter cartridges are produced every year at BRITA's UK head office in Bicester and we have worked closely with Grundon Waste Management to increase recycling throughout the production process, improve the ways we dispose of waste and make our operations more sustainable.
Among the changes has been the sending of unwanted or empty aerosols to a recycling centre, plastic cups replaced with cardboard ones at drinking stations, the recycling of damaged wooden pallets, and over 207,000kg of waste sent for recycling in just one year. We are always looking for different ways to be more sustainable and will keep working to make more improvements.
Many people are familiar with the "reduce, reuse, recycle" hierarchy but to continue to meet our commitment for 100% diversion from landfill we have used a more extensive model with 5 more levels. You can see some of the steps we have taken at each level in the chart below.
