Environmental Responsibility

We have two major environmental concerns just now: our use of plastic and our sale of peat.

Here’s what we’re doing about them.

Plastic

Plastic is one of the biggest environmental challenges we currently face in our business. Wood briquettes need to be kept dry and so their packaging is almost always plastic. This means our priorities are:

Find an effective, sustainable alternative to the plastic wrap used on individual packs of briquettes.

Address the plastic wrap we use to protect the pallets on their journey to your home.

Ensure that the plastic we do use is responsibly recycled

Individual Product Packaging

The packs of briquettes we sell are all manufactured elsewhere, by the companies that produce the sawdust. The briquettes arrive already wrapped in plastic. This is usually a shrink-wrap type plastic, which can be difficult to recycle in some areas. Discussions with producers about alternative means of packaging have not been very fruitful, with most producers understandably prioritising the quality of the product and being unwilling to package them in a way which might expose them to our high levels of atmospheric humidity. We’re working on it.

Working on Alternatives

Some of our suppliers have taken their environmental responsibility very seriously. They have put in a huge amount of time and expense to try and develop a sustainable alternative to plastic packaging.

For the last two years, we’ve worked with one UK supplier to get the product into a cardboard box and at first it worked very well. However, the briquettes quickly start to swell as they are susceptible to the high atmospheric moisture we have in the UK, so they have had to try alternatives. This has included lining the cardboard bags with a thin, recyclable plastic, wrapping the exterior of the boxes in a thin, recyclable plastic (neither of which proved suitable), and using a heavy duty waxed cardboard. Unfortunately, none of these options have worked well enough to be rolled out fully and they have had to go back to plastic. They are still experimenting.

We also experimented with products such as Pini-Kay in a cardboard box but sadly customers didn’t want to pay the extra cost for them. The plastic wrapped ones outsold them massively.

Hotmax produced a paper bag for their fuel logs, which we (and you!) loved. However, we ended up being their only supplier who chose to take the paper bags, so they understandably decided to go back to the plastic sacks.

Pallet Wrapping

When we’re preparing your pallet for dispatch, we have to ensure that it is packaged in a way that gives it the best chance of arriving at your door in prime condition. To do this, we have to consider:

• How the pallet is likely to be handled. Your pallet will be handled a lot on its journey. It will be lifted on and off lorries with a forklift and moved around warehouses and yards. Finally being wheeled to your kerbside by a pallet truck. Once it’s left our yard, it might well be handled by forklift drivers who are rushing or not quite as careful as they should be with someone else’s property.
• Weather. While being moved on and off lorries, our pallets are inevitably exposed to the British weather. They also have to survive potentially being left on the kerbside outside your house in the pouring rain. We also send products to islands, and sometimes have to be able to ensure they will survive ferry journeys.

We prioritise ensuring the briquettes reach our customers in the best possible condition, so for now we use plastic straps and a plastic stretch wrap to secure the pallet. For the last two years, we’ve been attempting to replace the black stretch wrap with a compostable, or at least bio-degradable, alternative. This has been harder than we could ever have anticipated, and this year for the first time ever we have suffered losses to the pallets, where items have been stolen while en route to customers. This means we’re back to using black security wrap for now.

The availability of compostable plastic alternatives is not good in the packaging industry yet. Only one supplier is able to provide a stretch wrap. This is a biodegradable wrap, which we’re currently testing but it’s not looking very hopeful. It’s expensive, more difficult to use and has the added problem of requiring a different sort of disposal to the rest of our packaging. We have no way of replacing with biodegradable alternatives, because there aren’t any available yet.

Recycling

We are now exploring providing our customers with a recycling service as part of our environmental responsibility..

For our local customers in Dumfries and Galloway, we already offer a plastic recycling scheme, where they can bring back all their plastic packaging and we take it to a company that recycles it into a variety of products. (www.solwayrecycling.co.uk) . This is quite an expensive process for us but we feel it’s important.

What we now plan to do is roll this out to our national customers as well. This won’t be a free service. A small optional disposal charge will be available at checkout. Those customers who would like to return their plastics to us will be provided with a prepaid bag (made from the same recyclable plastic), which they can fill with the plastic they remove from our products. Return it to us, and we send it to Solway Recycling.

Peat

In 2021, we stopped selling all peat products.

When we started the Wood Fuel Co-operative in 2011, we debated selling peat and did a poll of our members. They voted overwhelmingly for us to stock it, and were almost unanimously unconcerned with the environmental impacts of it. Last year, we revisited this in light of growing awareness of the unsustainability of peat and looked seriously at our books to work out if we could cut peat out of our product range. However, our peat sales contributed the equivalent of our annual rent bill to our bottom line. As a very small business we simply couldn’t sustain this level of loss all at once. However, we are pleased to say that in 2021, we completely phased out the sale of peat.

All our composts are also peat free. We stock Sylvagrow peat-free composts; the best on the market.

What’s the problem with peat?

Peat is a natural product. It has been used as a heating fuel for thousands of years. It is no longer just harvested by crofters cutting their own turf though. Commercially harvested in vast tracts, at a rate which far exceeds the 1mm per year at which it forms. Commercial harvesting releases vast amounts of carbon which has huge environmental implications.

“When bogs are drained to harvest peat, or for any other use, such as agriculture, grazing, or forestry, exposure to oxygen jump-starts the decomposition of the stored organic matter, releasing carbon into the atmosphere. A 2013 study of Irish peatland carbon emissions, published in Irish Geography, found that each hectare of industrially drained and stripped peatland emits 2.1 tons of carbon per year—the equivalent of driving a car 30,000 kilometers. And that’s before the harvested peat is burned.”

• Peat is one of the most effective carbon stores in the world. Ecologically, peat lands are our rainforests.
• The habitat provided by peat bog is invaluable for species such as curlew and heath butterflies.
• Burning peat releases even more carbon into the atmosphere, thereby increasing its environmental impact
• Peat is formed at an excruciatingly slow rate – about 1mm per year.

[1] Science Magazine

What else are we doing?

With your help, we’re restoring native woodland, in conjunction with The Borders Forest Trust.

Prior to lockdown, we worked with Borders Forest Trust to plant native trees in Scotland. For every one tonne of wood briquettes we sold, we planted one native tree in the UK. So far, we’ve planted 2000 trees under this scheme.