Read time: 2 mins
30 Jun 2020
We know that as vets you care about sustainability and want to work with like-minded businesses that tread lightly on the planet.
We work hard to keep our food miles and our carbon footprint low. We look carefully at every mile of our food's journey, from the field to the customer’s doorstep. We always try to source our ingredients as locally as possible while also balancing this with stock availability and ethics of a particular supplier.
All of our delivery partners have targets and commitments to lessen their impact on the planet - either through carbon neutral travel or carbon emission reduction strategies. Additionally, we have a transport policy that ensures we choose low or no emissions options wherever possible - we don’t use air shipping. This is the case for both our inbound and outbound logistics.
This is a huge issue in the UK, with recent reports suggesting that we throw away £13 billion of food every year. You’ll be glad to know that here at Butternut Box we're doing our bit to help by using funny shaped veg and less popular cuts of meat. As we all know, it doesn’t matter what a food looks like, as long as it’s choc full of vitamins, minerals and the good stuff it’ll be just as good for our pups to eat. So, we're happy to help save the planet by using unloved veg in our recipes.
The same goes for Butternut Box's meat. While all of it is fit for human consumption, we use less popular cuts as well as nutrient-rich offal, liver and heart. These cuts may not sound appealing to us, but they are of course the parts of meat that dog’s scavenger ancestors would have prized. They are full of vitamins such as the B-complex, E,D and K2 and trace minerals like copper, chromium and zinc.
Finally, our perfectly proportioned meals are helping to tackle the enormous problem of household food waste, as pet parents have no wasted or uneaten food to throw away.
Everything except our pouches and the inner packaging for our biscuits, in our standard boxes is recyclable either at home or through recycling schemes. This includes boxes, ice packs and insulation. We use special sheep’s wool insulation to keep all of our meals cool for delivery and customers can recycle this by handing it back to the courier.
We also follow the waste hierarchy (reduce, reuse, recycle) when we investigate packaging solutions. This means that whilst we are trying to find new packaging solutions, part of this focuses on improving what we currently do, and actually reducing packaging as a very first step.
If you would like to learn more about what we're doing to be more sustainable, feel free to reach out to us at sustainability@butternutbox.com.
