The sustainability agenda is one of the key challenges for businesses as we faced the increasing issues of climate change. As part of our wider Sustainability plan, S&J has committed to improve the sustainability of its packaging by reducing and where possible by entirely removing any unfriendly materials such as single-use plastics from the supply chain, and to minimising the volume of packaging used in transit and at point of sale.This transition to sustainable packaging began in 2021 with the Kew Gardens Collection of Garden tools. This project identified the following action points

• Remove adhesive brand labels from digging, cultivating and hand tools. 
• Change to FSC® materials for paper-based packaging including backing cards and swing tags 
• Reduce the amount of plastic packaging by switching to smaller formats, for example changing from a full blister to a smaller partial blister
• Change to environmentally-friendlier PET plastic 
• Remove all PVC plastic covers used in transit packaging, replacing them where needed with degradable paper-based alternatives.

Having successfully introduced these changes to the packaging of the Kew Gardens Collection the same principles have been adopted and are now being rolled out across the Spear & Jackson product portfilio which has already delivered some impressive results 

• 271,000 PVC Wallets removed from the heads of spades, forks and long-handled cultivators, amounting to a plastics reduction of 4.5 tonnes
• 81,000 PVC Blisters and Sliding Blisters reduced in size and changed to PET
• 42,000 PVC Front covers removed from boxed sets, a reduction of 2.75 Tonnes of plastic

This is only the beginning of the journey and S&J continues to develop more sustainable solutions across its entire business operations