Take Part in Plastic Free July with UAP

Plastic Free July is a global movement that “helps millions of people be part of the solution to plastic pollution – so we can have cleaner streets, oceans, and beautiful communities”. The organisation provides resources and ideas to help you reduce single-use plastic waste everyday at home, work, school, and so on. Sign up for the challenge here and take their “pesky plastics quiz” here.

Why we Support Plastic Free July

UAP is committed to improving people’s lives and general wellbeing, and we believe that we have a responsibility to significantly reduce our impact on the environment for the good of the planet. This is why we work closely with suppliers and customers around the world to implement ethical and environmentally-friendly business solutions. We have been able to find ways to lower our environmental impact while also boosting our credibility and raising profit margins, proving that becoming a more eco-friendly business doesn’t have to come with a large economic cost and cut to earnings, it’s just a win-win. Here are some things we’ve been doing over the years to reduce our impact on our planet.

Child Labour Laws

By 2004, we ensured that all our suppliers had ethical policies relating to child labour. This kicked off our concerns about how our products and business as a whole affected the planet, leading to the other initiatives and improvements that we involve ourselves in today.

Virtually Grid Neutral

We keep our energy and heat usage in our 50,000 square foot warehouses and offices over six buildings as low as possible – our energy bill comes to a little over £100 per building per month – not much more than the average homeowner would use.

Solar Power & Eco Renovations

Over time as the company has grown, we have had the opportunity to build upon and expand our Whitefield premises. In doing so, we chose to do it the greenest way possible, by installing solar panels and other low-energy and energy efficient features. These again contribute to our lower running costs, lowering overheads.

The plan going forward is to harness and retain the solar power energy that we generate during non-work periods to become virtually grid neutral, which will be a major step for us as an eco-friendly company.

Since the solar panels, we have also added thermodynamic water heating which links back to them, as well as a further 12kW of solar panels added to the roof. The addition of 150mm of roof insulation prevents our buildings from losing heat in the colder months so we don’t need to over-heat our offices.

Green Vehicles

The majority of our company cars are eco-friendly hybrids. In our company car park, we have installed EV charging units for electric cars, plus one for customers to use as well.

Recycle & Re-use

We have always been a company that likes to re-use what we have spare, packaging our products in recycled material – we shred old packaging to re-use as infill packing material and prioritise using recyclable material such as cardboard over plastic bags and blister packs. In the beginning, we did this for economic reasons as a small company with limited spare cash.