Innovative Packaging
Growing, packing and delivering your food puts us in a unique position to use as little packaging as possible. From sending lots of produce loose, to reusing our iconic veg boxes up to 10 times, we’re constantly working to minimise waste. Our fruit and veg packaging is now paper or home compostable, where packaging is needed at all.
Home compostable packaging on our fruit & veg
Paper we are all familiar with, but home compostable packaging may be new to you. These super sustainable materials may look like conventional plastic – but once disposed of, they properly biodegrade (breaking down not into microplastics, but into carbon dioxide, water vapour and organic matter, just like a plant decomposing) within one year. They break down like this even in low temperatures, such as your home compost heap.
We’ll collect your packaging!
Because we deliver ourselves and rely on repeat business with environmentally motivated customers, we’re strongly placed to collect our packaging for reuse, recycling a composting.
Our iconic reusable boxes are made from 98% recycled materials, and are 100% recyclable. They’re designed to be reused up to 10 times. If all our customers returned their veg boxes, this would save almost 22,000 trees’ worth of cardboard every year.
Can’t compost or recycle our other packaging through your local council? Leave it out with your box, and we’ll make sure it’s recycled or composted here at the farm. If it’s compostable, we’ll use it to grow more veg!
Our solution: home compostable packaging
You may have heard bad things about ‘degradable’ or ‘compostable’ plastics. There are many different types, and some are worse for the environment than conventional plastic. As well as being non-recyclable, they require high temperatures break down, meaning they don’t biodegrade if they end up in landfill or in the ocean. Home compostable packaging is different. It’s made from renewable raw materials, and breaks down at low temperatures. Many types are even certified to completely break down in marine environments, so they won’t cause harm if they do mistakenly end up in the ocean.
An impressive 82.5% of our customers compost their food or garden waste. This, combined with our well-honed system of collecting packaging to bring back to the farm for reuse, composting or recycling, convinced us that home compostable packaging is the right solution for us. We can’t use it for absolutely everything yet; a few items (such as meat) will still need to be packaged in plastic. But as now, we will use recycled or recyclable plastic wherever possible – and we’ll be keeping a close eye on future sustainable solutions as they develop.
