These actions have resulted in significant improvements to help the company meet its environmental goals including eliminating plastic blister packs and single use poly bags from its supply chain; recycling 180 tonnes of cardboard; using recycled materials from 63,000 old fridges and designing efficiency and modularity into its products to lower energy usage and reduce landfill waste.

As a strategy to reduce its environmental impact, the company has introduced its ‘3 pillars of sustainability’:

• Plastic – reduce and recycle

• Environmental - initiatives to reduce impact on the environment

• Energy efficient products - that reduce energy use.

By focusing on these key areas, the company says it has bought about real measurable change and is the next stage in Vent-Axia’s environmental journey.

“Sustainability is about finding solutions. From energy usage and climate change to air quality and future lifestyles, these are the areas where we can have the biggest positive impacts. We’re focussing on how we can improve lives through the impact of our products, our impact on the planet and our impact on our people”,said Lena Hebestreit, marketing manager at Vent-Axia.

Through its plastics initiative Vent-Axia has already stopped tonnes of plastics going to landfill each year, as well as reducing its own plastics usage. The company has achieved this by eliminating 630,000 single use plastic poly bags from its supply chain per year; by recycling 77 tonnes of plastic shrink wrap per year and will use 275,103 fewer blister pack units each year, with the latter saving nearly 10 tonnes of plastic, the equivalent weight of 3.5 African elephants.

The company has also seen 180 tonnes of cardboard and 90 tonnes of wood (pallets) being recycled; it purchased 3.5 tonnes of recycled packing material, which led to the supplier planting 81 trees and has gone from printing 13,000 catalogues (4.3m pages) a year in 2019 to 0 in 2020.

Vent-Axia is also designing its products to be modular to reduce plastic waste. In the last year 640 Revive fans have avoided going to landfill.

Vent-Axia and its wider sister companies are also diverting 200 tonnes of PVC from landfill by ensuring 100% of its PVC ducting is made from recycled sources. The Group is recycling the polystyrene content from old fridges to make High Impact Polystyrene (HIPS) for all rigid ducting accessories. This will save 63,000 fridges a year from going to landfill.