We've been awarded Responsible Business Champion 2020 by BITC!

We are delighted to announce we have been successfully awarded the accolade of ‘Responsible Business Champion 2020’ as part of Business in the Community’s (BITC’s) annual responsible business award.

We are one of four businesses that have achieved this accolade for the Connected Places category, and the award showcases our ‘1Change’ programme and how we are connecting our members together to tackle single-use plastic in our local communities.

What is the award?

BITC’s Responsible Business Awards recognises pioneering businesses addressing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals through integrating sustainability across their organisations and a demonstration of commercial success as a result. 

We are proud to have been awarded this title and a huge thank you goes out to our members and colleagues for your support in enabling us to achieve this.

Why are we part of the BITC’s Responsible Business Awards?

The award, in particular, recognises our 1Change campaign achievements including the following;

• Helping to engage over 1,000 member and community pledges to tackle single-use plastics in the community. 

• Enabled 1,000 eco-bricks to be created to build a Turkey shed made out of waste plastic for our community partner Fairy-tale Farm, by mobilising members, customers, community partners and schools to work together through our Cotswold Regional Community.  Helping to eliminate waste and conserve resources, we are the first UK retailer to offer this innovative solution through eco-bricks, and have developed a community model that can be rolled out in other areas.  

• Helping to rebuild the health of water, land and biodiversity in the community by enabling over 700 volunteers to tidy up 380 bags of litter from the natural environment across our 20 Regional Communities involving schools, members, community partners and colleagues. 

• As a result of our community engagement, we have been able to implement business changes that have resulted in a reduction of 2 tonnes of plastic per year through our operations

• Working with our valued members we have replaced single-use plastic carrier bags with compostable bags in over 100 Food Stores, eliminating over 3 million plastic bags per year. 

That's not all... Take a look at some of our environmental commitments from the recent World Environment Day: