Putting our own house in order
January 23, 2018We felt that it was important to underline the seriousness of our commitment to reduce plastic waste by cutting the amount of plastic we use in our own head office.
So prior to the public announcement of our plastics pledge on 16 January 2018 we stopped buying plastic bottles of water and soft drinks for our staff restaurant, meeting rooms and vending machines, and replaced them with glass bottles and cans.
We also encouraged all colleagues to buy reusable cups from our in-house Costa coffee bar, and stopped using disposable coffee cups completely as soon as our stock of these was exhausted. This is preventing 91,000 non-recyclable cups and lids a year being sent to landfill.
On the morning of the announcement every head office colleague found a refillable aluminium Iceland #toocoolforplastic water bottle waiting for them on their desk. We adjusted the chilled water dispensing mechanism on our refreshment vending machines so that these bottles and other containers could be refilled there free of charge, allowing us to end the use of disposable plastic cups. In the previous six months we had sent 62,000 of these to landfill, so this made a further 124,000 a year non-recyclable containers that we had taken out of our business.
Read Richard Walker’s blog here.
