Our company's about getting the most out of life. But it's no good us living life to the full if we're ruining our grandchildren's lives in the process.
We make a packaged product - and we're conscious that, in a truly sustainable world, we should really all be drinking out of the tap and avoiding packaging altogether. Bottled drink = environmental sin.
But given that we're living in a world where people want convenient drinks, here are a few things we do to try and ensure that ours are better than most...
We only use natural ingredients in our drinks. Things that grow in the ground are naturally replenishable and renewable - unlike synthetic ingredients. We brought out our first Organic drink in 2008.
We use the most widely-recyclable material - white glass - for Firefly, and encourage our customers to recycle them.
We do the obvious but important things in the office:- low-energy lightbulbs, recycling, etc.
A few tiny and obvious examples:
a) Our office faces South and gets pretty toasty in Summer. A couple of employees were begging for air conditioning. But we found that, with four carefully-placed 40W ceiling fans, we could live without it. Air conditioning is more evil than Fu Manchu, after all.
b) We realised we were using quite a lot of paper towels for drying our hands. So we decided to save resources with a set of hand-towels; we take it in turns to take them home and launder them each week.
c) All our employees cycle or take public transport to work. We even did a Summer sampling campaign where the entire team got around on bicycles, towing trailers of drinks behind.
There are a few things where we have to put our hands up...
These are made of PVC, which isn't widely recyclable. We've been trying out biodegradable sleeves, and our new Recharge sleeve is made of PET. We've also added a "perforated strip" to make it easier to take the sleeve off; this makes it easier to recycle the bottles.
Keeping things cold is a terrible waste of energy. Our drinks can be stored at room temperature, which saves lots of energy in storage and transit. But of course when you buy a Firefly you want it to be cold - so we encourage shops to keep Firefly in the chiller. Even the really evil open-fronted chillers; because we all know we're more likely to buy something if we can just reach and grab it rather than opening the door. (Silly but true). One day, this will change - it'll have to if we're going to meet out Kyoto targets - but until then, we'd be crazy to be the only drink that tells shops "please put doors on your Firefly fridges so people buy something else".
As mentioned above, bottles are bad. They use resources- both raw materials and energy. And they add to waste.
Glass bottles take up more material and energy to produce, but require less energy to recycle, and remain inert when disposed of.
Plastic bottles use less raw materials, and are now recyclable (though it's an energy-intensive process); but lots of them end up polluting landfills or floating in grim islands in the oceans.
One day, we hope to use recycled bottles. Our current bottles use around 33% recycled glass, but clearly, we can do better. In the meantime, we hope our customers will recycle ours - and everyone else's.
We don't fly much. Despite having customers in over 40 countries, we've only flown to about six of them. But sometimes we have to.
Sorry, was that another rant page? Do let us know what you think. And thanks for reading this far - good to know you care...
