SUSTAINABILITY

Close-up of a glowing vintage filament light bulb hanging with multiple blurred hanging bulbs in the background.

As a business we are committed to reducing our impact on the planet.

You can dive a little deeper by clicking here and reading our founders thoughts and thinking behind our sustainability goals, including a general ‘progress review’ since we committed to making sustainability a part of our business plan back in 2021. I am always happy to discuss sustainability and how we do more and do better - just email me here.

For us this means thinking about our actions and decisions and linking everything back to the impact it has.

Over the past few years we’ve been working hard to reduce our impact on the planet. It’s not easy, and you can read more by clicking the link above. We’re not perfect, but we do care. I call it being ‘Sustainably Minded’. It’s easy to over-complicate things, so we’re aiming to keep it simple. All our main decisions circle back to 3 questions and this is what we’re looking for whenever we list new products now:

1. Is is sustainable for the planet?
2. Is it sustainable for the business?
3. Is it the best product / service / solution?

Alongside this we are fully committed to further reducing waste across the business (and we’re already seeing great results having reduced glass waste by over 50% in the last 12 months for example).

Our focus for 2025 is to start to continue the progress we’ve made over the past couple of years to really embed them in the business and the way we work. We’ve done a lot of work to try to encourage others, our suppliers etc, to be better and we’re continuing to do that. We’re even fortunate enough to occasionally influence other businesses to do better as well and if we can all make a difference, that would be a massive achievement.

Current key suppliers & partnerships:

This is not an extensive list, but it’s the ones we’re currently most proud of/making the most difference.

  • From April 2025 - Octopus Energy are our current supplier, supplying us with renewable electricity.

  • We are a founding member of Amplifi.tw - a business focussed network and community trying to make a difference and to encourage change locally. We have also started hosting ‘People Planet Pint’ - a meetup group designed to promote and discuss sustainability (over a pint of course!)

  • Our house Gin and Vodka is supplied by Sapling Spirits. They plant a tree for every bottle sold, work in a sustainable, carbon neutral way and their Gin is actually Carbon Negative - meaning it takes carbon out of the atmosphere. They also supply us in refillable bottles.

  • Our local spirits suppliers supply us in bulk containers. We refill bottles in house. Less waste, less transport. Greensand Ridge and Jonomade. They also have strong sustainability credentials too.

  • 90% of our wine list (by volume) is now supplied by Sustainable Wine Solutions. They have a fantastic bottle return scheme, which means we now return 90% of our wine bottles to be refilled. They also supply us with bulk containers for our house rums and tequila, meaning we refill in house, saving a little bit more waste.

  • We try to minimise food waste and where we can, donate food to Charlies Angels - a local not-for-profit kitchen that solely uses donated food that would otherwise be wasted.

  • We act as a collection point for corks from our customers and send them all back to Recorked, along with our own.

  • Suppliers we work with regularly who work in a sustainable way include Sapling Spirits (Carbon Negative), Greensand Ridge Distillery (Carbon Neutral), Salcombe Distillery, Maidstone Distillery, Sipsmith Distillery (B Corp), Fairfields Crisps, Two Drifters Rum (Carbon Negative), Toti Rums (Conservation, saving turtles), Bruichladdich (Conservation and Sustainable across multiple projects), Brewery Huyghe (Aiming to be Belgiums most sustainable brewery), Utopian (Aiming to be carbon neutral, only uses UK malt & hops), Haalve Man / Brugse Zot (Sustainable with some incredible initiatives), Pleasant Land Distillery, Pentire, Ascension Cider and many more.

    DEFINITIONS:

    • Sustainable - by sustainable I mean working in a way that either removes or reduces the damage caused from producing said product. This could be being carbon neutral or doing everything they can to be as sustainable as possible. It is also not just about being 'green’ and focussing solely on the environment. The business needs to be financially sustainable too.

    • Giving something back - being fully sustainable is hard - we champion and support small independent businesses a lot of the time and they, like us, don’t always have the means at first to meet the standard. However, in a lot of cases they are able to give something back - be it supporting conservation, charities or making a firm commitment (like we are).

    • Suppliers - these are everyone from breweries and distillers to our waste company, phone company, energy company and all the people in between. It’s all encompassing.