Striving for Sustainability at Barnardo’s

Our recycling and sustainability initiatives:

At Barnardo's, we're constantly looking for ways to reduce our environmental impact and promote sustainable practices. Here are just a few of the initiatives we've implemented:

• We recycle damaged donations to our retail shops including textiles, shoes, books, DVDs and CDs. In addition to this, we recycle plastics, cardboard, metal and electrical items.
• We’ve switched to sugar poly carrier bags which are carbon neutral in manufacture and 100% recyclable.
• Sustainable Procurement: Single-use plastics are out, sustainable packaging is in. We reuse cardboard boxes from our stores to distribute stock from our warehouses.
• Energy Efficiency: We launched our first colleague energy efficiency campaign in November 2022 to lower our energy consumption across all our services.
• Travel: To reduce carbon emissions produced by Barnardo’s, we encourage staff and volunteers to use public transport, walk, or cycle to work.
• Education and Awareness: We're committed to raising awareness of environmental issues and promoting sustainable practices among our staff, volunteers, and service users. That’s why we launched sustainability updates to ensure everyone is kept in-the-loop with our initiatives.
• Waste Management: Working closely with our waste and recycling contractors, we’re reducing general waste and upping our recycling efforts. We are also reducing the number of journeys from our waste collectors to reduce our Co2 emissions.
• Other schemes include ink and toner and battery recycling which resulted in 847kg of batteries recycled in 2022-23.