Contributing to Recycling & Sustainability
This week is National Recycling Week and sustainability is firmly on the national agenda and the public is looking to organisations to help solve major environmental issues. That makes Recycle Week a greater opportunity than ever to change people’s recycling behaviours while gaining positive publicity and building an organisation’s reputation.
Now in its 18th year, Recycle Week is a celebration of recycling, organised by WRAP under the Recycle Now brand. The aim of the week is to encourage the public to recycle more, by demonstrating the benefits of recycling items from all around the home and have submitted plans to the United Nations for our own pledge to help with climate change and to reduce the carbon footprint to zero by 2030.
Missenden Abbey’s #20PercentLess pledge includes reduction on reducing single use plastics across all areas of the operation. The steps that we have taken are:
- Plastic straws have been removed from the bars.
- Plastic cups at the refreshment stations have been replaced with glasses or refillable jugs.
- Food packaging has been reduced by a full review of the food suppliers review and now 80% of our food purchasing comes within 10-mile radius. The local suppliers are using open reusable boxes for the provision deliveries. Up to £10,000 per year, which includes all the herbs and salad leaves and seasonal fresh produce is provided from the Walled Garden which is freshly picked on the day.
- Paperless culture – all our administration is now paperless. We switched from printing to scanning.
- Laundry deliveries are now in large metal cases rather than in individually plastic wrapped bags. This has decreased the use of the large refuse bags by 80% across the operation.
- The kitchen waste is sorted and all vegetable and fruit peelings and coffee and tea waste are composted. Our General waste bins have reduced in size since 2015 and now this represents only 20% of the overall waste.
- All meeting rooms have recycling bins to encourage all our clients to recycle any waste.
- Beautiful grounds – the project has been introduced in 2018 when we have carried out the review of the large grounds and how to reduce the waste from the seasonal flower beds into 50% perennial flower beds in 2019-20. This has improved the pressures of growing of new plants regarding the plastic trays, water and soil. The compost is now produced on site from our kitchen waste and since 2019 no flower bed compost has been purchased.
- Bar barrels return to our supplier so they can be reused.
- When the coffee beans have been used in the coffee machines and pour through they turn into a heavy soil texture. This is then taken to the Missenden Walled Garden and scattered onto the plants to use as a fertiliser.
We are proud of what we do to contribute to recycling and sustainability at the Abbey and we are continually committed to help the environment.
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