We recently played a key role - as a Sustainability sponsor - at the 2019 kbbreview Retail & Design Awards which were held in Manchester last week (4th April). These national awards, now in its 25th year, celebrated the best retailers, designers and manufacturers in the UK kitchen and bathroom industry.
Organisers kbbreview wanted to make sustainability a key theme for furniture industry representatives travelling to the awards from across the UK. To that end they calculated the event's carbon footprint, including associated travel of attendees from across the UK, and designed
sustainability projects in the UK, Africa and India to off-set the carbon footprint:
- In Greater Manchester, 70 young trees from the community-backed Hulme Garden Centre in inner Manchester will be planted in the
Royal Horticultural Society's new 154-acre Garden Bridgewater development in Salford. Elsewhere, other young trees will be donated to Greater Manchester primary school garden and education activities.
- In Africa, communities in Uganda will be helped to identify and repair broken boreholes to provide safe water supplies and vastly reduce the need to boil water before drinking.
- In India, a sustainability scheme will replace traditional domestic cooking stoves with cleaner, greener stoves. Currently 75% of domestic stoves in India are fuelled by burning wood and agricultural waste.
A selection of our senior management team attended to reinforce HPP's commitment to our own efforts, and to highlight the wider furniture industry's sustainability issues:
- Factory heat-recycling in key manufacturing processes;
- Installation of solar panels and bio-mass heat generation;
- Better waste-sorting and recycling;
- Increased use of recyclable packing;
- Adoption of LED lighting across the business;
- Prompt repairing of machinery and ongoing maintenance programmes to optimise equipment use and cut waste energy inefficiencies.
It is hoped that the Awards legacy of highlighting sustainability within the wider furniture and timber products industry will create a ripple of positive change that will fundamentally change how the whole KBB industry chain, from raw material suppliers and manufacturers to distributors, wholesalers, showrooms and installers, should embrace sustainability measures which, combined, will make a significant contribution.
Alongside us as Sustainability Partners for the Awards were Kaldewei and Used Kitchen Exchange.