Sustainability Policy
In line with our purpose and values, to ensure the best possible chance of achieving our objective of being an example of best practice within our industry, we will:
- integrate sustainability considerations into all of our business decisions.
- encourage all businesses we work with to consider sustainability in their decisions and support them to use best practices when working with us.
- ensure that products and services we use are responsibly sourced.
- comply with, and exceed where practicable, all applicable legislation, regulations and codes of practice.
- encourage staff and contractors to be advocates for sustainable practices and sustainability.
Practical Steps
- To help ensure we meet the policy requirements we will:
- set a monthly meeting to review business decisions and whether they have considered sustainability.
- find out if businesses we work with have sustainability policies and communicate our expectations around sustainability and best practices when they work with us.
- make clients and contractors aware of our Sustainability Policy and encourage them to adopt sustainable best practices.
- create a report, reviewed monthly to track progress against targets to ensure products are responsibly sourced.
- review all relevant legislation as it changes and implement processes to enable compliance.
- ensure that all staff are fully aware of our Sustainability Policy and are committed to implementing and improving it.
Legal Constraints and/or Enablers
There are no sustainability related legal or regulatory requirements that apply to our business this year.
Who does this policy apply to?
This policy applies to all staff, contractors and temporary staff.
Policy Compliance
We expect the business to be able to fully comply with the policy within 6 months of the date of publishing so that the actions required to enable compliance are completed. Non-compliance will be managed through a formal review process.
Environmental Policy
We’re all becoming more aware of the impact our choices have on the world around us and the ramifications of these impacts for people near and far both in time and space.
As a working farm we are not only witness to these effects but also at the forefront of making changes to combat them. As a wedding business we’re well aware of the problems with waste within the wedding industry and passionate about doing our best to make sure that our couples are able to have as little impact as they choose to on their big day. This can range from making sure that your food waste is composted and your flowers go to a local nursing home to helping you source biodegradable plates and local ingredients along with your caterer.
We take our inspiration from the Ashridge Great Barn itself. The Barn is the epitome of locally soured with the timber coming from the farm woodland, the clay for the cob being dug out of the hillside where the building now nestles and the stone coming from a quarry further down the valley. The tin is from Wales and is the building material which has travelled the furthest. We were lucky to work with some amazing local craftsmen in restoring the Barn who shared our love for old buildings and local resources and were able to restore the building within the same spirit.
We aim to be zero-waste with our own events, although the sad reality is that many things come wrapped in plastic film. To this end we use vintage crockery and cutlery rather than disposable options. We take great care to source ingredients as locally as possible and bake the cakes and other goodies that we sell. We provide bins for recycling and anything that can be composted will be!
Our water is sourced from a borehole on site and all our waste is processed in a bio-digester here as well. We’re currently looking at the cost of sourcing our electricity from sustainable sources too.
We’re proud to work with a range of wedding and event suppliers who share our environmental concerns and who are also working towards a more sustainable wedding industry in the future. We’re all convinced that a beautiful, meaningful wedding doesn’t have to cost the earth in any sense of the phrase.
Please feel free to ask us about our environmental credentials – we love talking about the journey we’re on!
