Leading garden centre group, Haskins Garden Centres, has allocated all 600 team members with a reusable water bottles to help reduce single-use plastic in the overall business.

Head office has been looking further into the company’s recycling and waste policy in order to make small steps along the way to reduce its environmental footprint.

In order to kickstart an awareness campaign, Haskins chose to reduce the use of single-use water bottles and cups in the workplace and issued all staff with a refillable water bottle.

Lisa Looker, brand director at Haskins Garden Centre, commented: “By issuing all team members with a reusable water bottle, we hope to raise awareness of our own habits and bring that influence into the workplace. Our aim is to get everyone engaged and involved with company-wide objectives. We’ve taken many steps to reduce our environmental footprint, through recycling more of our waste, to reducing single-use plastic in our restaurants and overall business. To help us on this sustainable journey, we gave all our team members a reusable bottle in a bid to use less single-use plastic.”

Haskins is investigating other environmentally friendly changes other than reusable water bottles, which include:

• Encouraging customers to bring their own bags – as a destination retailer with parking right outside, customers can easily bring their own bags to reduce the amount of packaging offered to customers
• Waste management – head office is reviewing the company’s commercial waste management and recycling program
• Training team members to be more equipped to answer questions and offer advice about local recycling services, kerbside and council recycling facilities

Lisa added: “As a leading garden centre group, we have an obligation to make responsible decisions to protect the environment and maintain sustainable and commercially viable garden centres. We don’t claim to have all the answers, but we are making little steps on the way to make an improvement and hope to continue to do more in the future.”

Haskins has centres in Ferndown in Dorset, West End in Southampton and Roundstone and Snowhill in West Sussex. For more information visit www.haskins.co.uk