Tackling waste at the Eden Project
With over a million people visiting Eden every year, we have to think carefully about the waste we produce. We carefully choose which materials we buy, and reduce and recycle where we can.
How we watch our waste at Eden
When we first built Eden we set ourselves the target of becoming ‘Waste Neutral’. A bit like being carbon neutral, we aimed to ‘balance’ what we sent for recycling and disposal (eg aggregates) with what we bought in as recycled products (eg soil), based on weight.
Now that we've built Eden, we manage our day-today operations with a view to reducing our waste as much as possible. When we buy in new products we try to choose those which are recycled – to help stimulate the market for them. Here's how we do it:
Measure
We audit our operations to check we’re not wasting materials. A good example of this is that we used to have more disposable crockery in our restaurants but we found that we could employ extra staff to sort waste and wash crockery – and still save money and reduce landfill.
Reduce
We work with our suppliers to reduce the amount of packaging brought on to site. For example, we try to use returnable crates instead of boxes and we even collaborate with producers on product design to reduce the amount of packaging on goods we sell in our shop. We have reduced our waste by 23% compared to our baseline year of 2007-2008.
Reuse
We have an on-site waste and recycling compound where we sort everything. Our maintenance and design teams can often be found scouring this for things that they can turn into something else.
Recycle
We make sure, wherever possible, that what we buy can be recycled at the end of its life. Sometimes we team up with other local businesses to make it economically viable to send a small amount of a certain material for recycling.
Reinvest
We reinvest in the recycling industry by buying recycled stuff – from toilet rolls for the several hundred on-site loos to the lovely gifts we sell in our shop.
Eden's pledge to our visitors
Under the Producer Responsibility Obligations (regulations on waste, basically) we make sure that we:
- calculate the amount of packaging we pass on to our visitors, through our cafes and shop: around 90 tonnes a year
- weigh and record everything that could become rubbish
- help visitors correctly dispose of items that are marked with the symbols below.
Get the full report
Read about our Waste Neutral programme to reduce waste on site and promote our principles.
Download the report
