Crown Paints celebrates decade of success with earthbalance

Crown Paints is celebrating ten successful years of its award-winning earthbalance sustainability scheme, which aims to limit its impact on the environment.

Crown’s earthbalance scheme, which was launched in 2008, sets out the company’s commitment to being more sustainable and less wasteful as well as helping customers and staff make responsible decisions.

The earthbalance scheme touches on all aspects of Crown’s business from manufacturing to packaging and applies to all staff and operations at Crown’s two UK manufacturing plants in Darwen and Hull as well as its network of more than 150 Crown Decorating Centres in the UK.

Over 10 years through the earthbalance scheme, Crown has reduced its overall electricity consumption by 15 per cent, reduced packaging waste by approximately 15 per cent, recycled more than 800 tonnes of paint cans and donated 112 benches made using recycled paint cans through social enterprise NIMTECH. Its popular ‘Can Back’ service, which is run through its network of Crown Decorating Centres in partnership with NIMTECH has seen thousands of empty cans recycled rather than being thrown away.

Crown has also reduced the amount of waste going to landfill with 65 per cent of waste being reused or recycled in some way, including 39,000 litres of paint, benefitting a number of deserving community projects through its ‘Kick out the Can’ initiative. As a member of the global Hempel Group, Crown is committed to working towards reducing CO2 by 12 per cent in the next two years – a target it is on track to achieve.

As part of the earthbalance scheme, Crown holds Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) through BRE on its most popular products, demonstrating their compliance with the European Standard EN 15804.

And to top off a successful decade of earthbalance, last year Crown became the first paint manufacturer in the UK to launch paint containers made from 100 per cent recycled post-consumer waste (PCW) plastic, which marks a significant improvement to the plastic paint containers manufactured from 25 per cent recycled plastic currently available in the UK.

Philip Cefai, managing director at Crown Paints commented: “We’re very proud of the earthbalance scheme and everything it’s helped us achieve over the last 10 years. We’ve worked hard to ensure staff from across the whole business are on board and engaged with the scheme and as a result earthbalance is now a central part of the culture at Crown Paints.

“Over the years the scheme has been recognised for numerous national awards and we believe it’s made a real difference to our environmental credentials as a company. We’re constantly looking for new ways to improve and the earthbalance scheme will remain a key part of our company ethos as we go forward into the next decade.”