Celebrating a decade of success for earthbalance
Our award-winning earthbalance sustainability scheme, which aims to limit our impact on the environment as a company, has just celebrated its 10th anniversary and we couldn’t be more proud of what we’ve achieved during that time.
The earthbalance scheme, which was launched in 2008, sets out our commitment to being more sustainable and less wasteful as well as helping customers and staff make responsible decisions. The earthbalance scheme touches on all aspects of the business from manufacturing to packaging and applies to all staff and operations at our two UK manufacturing plants in Darwen and Hull as well as our network of more than 150 Crown Decorating Centres in the UK.
Over 10 years through the earthbalance scheme, we’ve reduced our overall electricity consumption by 15 per cent, reduced packaging waste by approximately 15 per cent, recycled more than 800 tonnes of paint cans and donated 112 benches made using recycled paint cans through social enterprise NIMTECH.
We’ve also reduced the amount of waste going to landfill with 65 per cent of waste being reused or recycled in some way, including 39,000 litres of paint, benefitting a number of deserving community projects through our ‘Kick out the Can’ initiative.
As part of the earthbalance scheme, we now hold Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) through BRE on six of our most popular trade products, demonstrating their compliance with the European Standard EN 15804.
And to top off a successful decade of earthbalance, last year we became the first paint manufacturer in the UK to launch paint containers made from 100 per cent recycled post-consumer waste (PCW) plastic, which marks a significant improvement to the plastic paint containers manufactured from 25 per cent recycled plastic currently available in the UK.