For around 15 years now we’ve been focused on our company’s sustainable practices and finding ways to reduce our carbon footprint. This year, we’re pleased to announce that we are now officially one of the first Carbon Neutral Plus retailers in the UK!

This has been achieved by continually reducing our carbon output due to vigilance on heating, lighting, wastage and by numerous initiatives and investments. These have included the use of solar panels, better delivery routing and how we have designed and constructed our stores with the environment firmly front of mind.

This Carbon Neutral status has been verified by an independent specialist company, who, not only granted us carbon neutral status, but also Carbon Neutral PLUS, due to the work we have done over the last ten years with our Trees4Trees reforestation programme.

From 2021, we’re planting a tree for every delivery made by Barker and Stonehouse. Working with Trees4Trees, we’re pledging to plant at least 75,000 trees this year!

Once your furniture has been delivered, we will plant a seedling on your behalf. We’ll also send you a link where you can see the location of all of the trees we’ve planted.

Planting a tree helps a farming family in a developing country by assuring that the farmer will continue to plant trees in the future. Your tree will also help absorb harmful carbon from the atmosphere, cleaning the air we breathe.

Over the past years, each time we’ve built a new store we’ve carefully considered its design from an environmental impact perspective.

We’ve improved our overall energy usage across our sites by invested in intelligent low-energy heating and lighting systems for all our stores and using renewable energy from solar panels where we can. We’ve also replaced all lighting in our stores with energy-efficient LED lightbulbs.

Where it is physically possible, we’ve planted living walls on our stores, creating a wildlife habitat and increasing biodiversity as well as helping to clean the air.

We have recently introduced a fleet of new Maximover delivery vans and trailers to help us continue on our carbon reduction journey. They’re fantastic vehicles that help us to reduce our environmental impact. They achieve this because they’re much lighter and twice as fuel efficient than our old fleet. We are now exploring the introduction of electric vehicles as we renew our fleet over time.

We have also made significant investment in routing technology to ensure delivery vehicles make the most fuel-efficient routes, thereby cutting down on emissions.