Our green plan

By 2030, we want Neptune to be carbon neutral.

We know it’s ambitious, but it’s not the right time to make half-hearted gestures. We’re a growing team with growing responsibilities. Our impact is getting bigger and our reach wider. We have communities, creative partners, makers, stores and customers to think about. Owning our own production puts us in a unique position. We’re not a big conglomerate with shareholders to please, nor are we a cog in a bigger machine. We can be guided by our own principles and be designers of our own future. With you we can create a more beautiful world, and here’s how we’re going to do it.

We went back to the drawing board to better understand our environmental impact. The result was a set of ambitious goals and a new roadmap – our intent to make a difference. It’s been a challenging and rewarding ride so far, and we thought it was time to share it with you in case you wanted to join us on the journey. Hopefully, you’ll see that by supporting Neptune in our efforts, you’ll be re-investing in our planet – even tending the wild – and if it inspires you to adopt a greener life, then we believe you’ll find it’s a good one too.

Understand our impact

Where to start? Without understanding our impact, we couldn’t ring the changes. Our investigations made for interesting reading and highlighted opportunities to make some immediate changes. Since we make almost everything that we sell, we could chart the turn of the lathe to the delivery of your new kitchen. We could assess every emission, material and process to measure the environmental implication on everything we do so that, in the future, we can show you the impact of making your kitchen table against a long lifetime of use.

We also got a better reading of our true carbon footprint. Since the end of 2019, we’ve reduced our impact by over 20%. We did this quite simply by installing solar panels, using heat pumps instead of gas-run boilers and reducing our energy use. There’s still much to do, and we’re excited and optimistic about making progress.

What can you do? Get a better understanding of your impact by installing a smart meter or calculating your own carbon footprint.

Reset the balance

A good team can dream big, but it needs focus. So we’ve recruited a team of committed advocates from every part of the business; their job is to look for every opportunity to make a difference by making a change. This team got their heads together and mapped out a plan that started with reducing our negative impacts. Some are big and some are smaller, but they all have an effect. Switching to renewable energy, re-thinking rubbish, composting, finding a use for our wood offcuts, ditching the solvent glues, ensuring our parts and materials are sourced sustainably, and reducing our transport impact by aiming for a gross carbon-neutral delivery fleet.

Whilst we’ve always focussed on using as much cardboard in our packaging as possible, we’ve so far failed to exclude all single use plastics. We’ve spent two years researching new sources, juggling partners and persisting through multiple lockdowns to finally switch to recyclable packaging for all our furniture designs, which we’re rolling out now. It’s worth mentioning that, for a while now, we’ve been bringing packaging home with us from deliveries and then ensuring that none of it goes to landfill.

What can you do? There are so many ways we can contribute – we can try buying locally and eating seasonally, switching to a renewable energy supplier in our own homes, dusting off our bikes and, of course, trying to avoid unnecessary single use packaging.

Enrich & regenerate

Here at Neptune, it’s what we make that can have the biggest positive impact. Designs that really last a lifetime, materials sustainably sourced and a focus on repairing, reusing or rehoming. We celebrate longevity. It’s a better response to the clarion call to keep buying more.

We also carefully choose who we work with. Our partners are inspiring, likeminded people that share our values. Trusting our partners means we have confidence over where our raw materials come from and how they’re made into products. From the bigger stuff – we’re part of the UN Global Compact – to our carbon neutral local printers.

What can you do? It’s easier than ever to vote for sustainability with our wallets. Companies are now more open about their policies and often, once we start to include this thinking in our buying process, our instincts will help us to determine whether their values match up with ours.

Make a more beautiful world

Green walls, wormeries, bat boxes, hedgehog tunnels and bee hotels. We’re thinking about ways to encourage biodiversity on the land we already own (coming to a store near you), and develop woodland projects for broadleaf and at-risk native trees. We want to protect and preserve natural habitats and develop links with agriculture and nature through sustainable champions at our local café, The Provenist.

What can you do? Try meat-free Mondays, look into home composting systems, plant different native flower species and support local producers.

So this is what it’s going to look like for Neptune and how we plan to do it. We live in a world of wonder and it’s time we increase our efforts to look after it. We hope you’ll join us.