an innocent guide to Copenhagen

The planet's doomed right? It's time to pack the tinned goods and head north. Well not just yet, but we are definitely in last chance territory to keep our climate in a more friendly condition. World leaders will be gathering in Copenhagen this December to try and secure a crucial international agreement for significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. There's a bit more information from our Sustainability Jess about why this is all so important on our new innocent guide to Copenhagen page.

Jess will be visiting the Department of Energy and Climate Change in November to meet Ed Miliband, the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change. Ed Miliband will be attending the Copenhagen meeting so we thought we'd ask him some questions about the meeting, the UK position and climate change. If you have a question you'd like Jess to ask Ed then complete the form here and we'll pick the five most popular questions for Ed to answer. This guy is important in getting the deal we need in Copenhagen, so it should be interesting to hear what he has to say.

Want do even more yourself? Then check out this site.

no bad things in our packaging

Scientists at Exeter University published some research this week linking Bisphenol A (a chemical compound used in some food and drink packaging) to cardiovascular disease and diabetes. Which is a bit worrying.

We just wanted to let you know that all our packaging contains none of this bad Bisphenol A stuff, so there's no need for you to be fretting.

(more via the BBC)

here’s a question for you...

Do you think the following item is:

a) A tool for working out where we get our fruit from
b) A really fancy cheese plate
c) The Barclays Green Leaders in Business Award trophy

Yep, it’s C (we know the silver plate at the bottom gave it away).

This week has been a great week - not only did the sun shine for about 15 minutes on Wednesday, but we also won a Barclays Green Leaders In Business Award. The awards were designed for British businesses to demonstrate how they are addressing the global environmental challenges we all face through the use of new processes, technology, products and services.

We really liked the philosophy behind these awards as it was about proving that sustainability and being a successful, competitive business can go hand in hand. Becoming a sustainable business is something that we passionately believe in and all of us are committed to delivering our sustainability goals.

We know that there isn't always a perfect solution but there is definitely always a better one and we’re not afraid to work hard to achieve our goals. As the old saying goes, if at first you don’t succeed – keep trying until you do. It's been a really busy year on sustainability for us so far. We've been working on:

Getting our pineapples from Rainforest Alliance certified farms - The first pineapple farms in Latin America were certified at the end of 2007, and we took the first delivery of certified pineapple earlier this year.

Rolling out our own set of minimum standards for sustainability with our suppliers which cover all relevant social and environmental issues.

Introducing a brand new label for our bottles made from 25% recycled paper and 75% paper from forests that have been certified by the Forest Stewardship Council.

Reducing the amount of paper used in our kids’ wedges and 1L carton by 10%.

Introducing key performance indicators for all our production, packaging and logistics suppliers to drive forward continuous improvements in the areas of energy, water and waste.

Whilst we’re immensely proud of the work we’ve achieved so far, we know we have a long way to go, and the journey never really ends.

Sustainability is always a process of constant improvement to ensure that we are running the business in the best way possible and that we make the most responsible choices as we grow. Every day we are looking for new ways to become a more sustainable business and encouraging our suppliers to do the same. Our plans going forward are to make the step change from ‘greening’ our current business model to what we are calling ‘advanced sustainability’ (until we think of a catchier term). Basically, we want to challenge everything about our business to make sure we’re doing everything that bit better.

In terms of this award, we were up against some pretty tough competition so we are extremely chuffed that we won. A big thanks to the judging panel for picking us as a winner, to our suppliers for working towards our sustainability goals with us, and to everyone who works at innocent for doing their little bit.

Right, where's the cheese?

stop the drop

Bill consults the professionals

When you've had enough of the men's platform synchro diving, archery and other sporting delights, flick over to BBC1 at 8.30pm tonight to watch Panorama. The author Bill Bryson (who's also the President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE)) will be taking a cold, hard look at the mess we’re making of our glorious land. Apparently we drop 25 million tonnes of litter each year and spend £650 million trying to clean it up. So Bill and the CPRE launched their ‘Stop the Drop’ campaign on 16th April which we applaud (loudly).

Anyone can get involved. Detailed information is available at www.cpre.org.uk on how we can all help, including emailing your MP or organising a litter pick in your neighbourhood. So watch the show tonight, visit the site and don't make a mess, please.

today in the telegraph

Good morning. It's Saturday and we are blogging live from our village fete. Very exciting.

We picked up the papers on the way to the park and read some stuff in the Telegraph about us being a 'greenwash' company. So we thought we'd clear up a couple of the points raised.

First of all, we did have some out-of-date information on our website, which we changed earlier this week. We need to get more efficient at checking it all, so we shall.

But we still stand by what we have always said - we want to make the best quality drinks with the lowest possible carbon impact.  To do so, we buy the best ingredients possible and then find the most carbon-efficient way of getting them to our drinkers.  We have a policy of moving our ingredients by land or sea only; we will not air freight them.

Our ingredients come from three main geographical areas - the UK, continental Europe and the tropics.  The tropical fruit arrives in Holland via Rotterdam, Europe's main fruit port, and is blended in Holland with the European fruit on a daily basis.  We then put the blended fruit into chilled tankers (the same as used for transporting fresh milk) and bring it by boat from Holland to the UK. The tankers come to the UK ports that are closest to our bottling sites (our main sites are in Wales and Somerset) to minimise transporting by road in the UK.  We then blend these ingredients with the locally squeezed fruits (eg our oranges) and other local ingredients at our UK bottling plants and then deliver the smoothies to our customers.  All of this happens six days a week, as we don't squeeze and blend on Sundays in the UK.  This way of blending part of our smoothies in Europe with the European fruit and then in the UK with the other fruit and ingredients means that we minimise the amount of energy used in transporting our ingredients, ensuring we get the best drinks for the least carbon.

And that's that. Now, on with the fete...

mystery veg

We like vegetables. So we’re very excited to have the people from Riverford come along to our fete this year. What they don’t know about veg isn’t worth the forking manure, and we consider them to be a key partner in our quest to help people eat slightly fewer sausage rolls and a bit more fruit and veg.

As part of this quest, Riverford would like you to bring your strangely shaped veg to our fete. Wonky carrots, bulbous onions and courgettes that look like the Dalai Lama – all are welcome. The best ones will win a prize and be shown off in the Riverford tent. Or you can just post a photo of your weird veg here.

Also, we have a small competition for you. Just name the vegetables below (proper Latin names please, as well as their everyday names) and you can win one of three fancy boxes of Riverford fruit and veg. Post your answers as a comment, along with a tie-breaker – a maximum of 15 words completing the following phrase - "I love wonky veg because............"

Good luck (deadline is the end of this Friday 25th July).

Mystery veg 1

Mystery veg 2

tetra tent

Along with a few other thousand revellers, our Lucie went along to Glastonbury last weekend for a spot of festival living, falafel munching and Jay Z appreciating.

While she was there, she spotted this brilliant little tent/igloo structure in the Green Fields

It's made completely from used tetra cartons and some very bendy twigs.

On closer inspection, Lucie discovered a couple of rather familiar looking panels inside

Hats off to whoever made this ingenious recycled tetra tent. We salute you.

neve's tree

This is Neve.

Neve is four years old, lives in Somerset and likes to help her dad, Darren, with the gardening. And she's taken our Buy One, Grow One Tree message quite literally.

Not only has she made her own plant pot out of an empty carton.

She's also rescued a sapling from her dad's weeding pile.

Found a nice, sunny spot to plant it in.

And made sure it's properly watered everyday to ensure it'll grow up nice and strong.

We like Neve and her little tree a lot.

recycle week 2008

As you may know, this week is Recycle Week 2008, and our friends over at Tetra Pak are doing their best to raise the campaign's awareness.  We use Tetra Pak's cartons for our big smoothies, so we're obviously very keen to get as many people reycling them as possible. 

Tetra Pak are hoping to get as many people as they can to reycle the cartons and you can even pledge to do this on their website.  Most councils in the UK will now recycle cartons, so it's really just about raising awareness.

If you'd like to find out more about the the project, you could have a look on Tetra Pak's website.  This video of cartons being recycled in Brazil is also pretty interesting.

Very neatly squashed Tetra Paks

A bundle of Tetra Paks

We used to be a Tetra Pak

even more trees

We're still fully in our 'take your comments on board AGM week' at the minute so here's another update on how you're all constantly helping to make us a little bit better.

Last year towards the end of our Buy One Grow One Tree project we asked you all if you could think of anyway to improve the project in future. You gave us some great feedback as comments to this blog post. A lot of the comments concerned us giving you more information on where the trees are planted and the communities benefiting from the trees.

So Geoff got our man on the ground in India to have a look about with his video camera. Here's the result.

We've also made a little Google Map showing you exactly where some of the trees are planted (Thurinjapuram, India) so you can zoom right up. Don't go too fast though, it's like virtual sky diving.

You also said that you wouldn't mind it if you could add our virtual badge to FaceBook profiles as well as blogs and stuff. So we've fixed that this year too. You can now add a badge to your own page by planting a tree and then going here.

We'll be asking for even more feed back again towards the end of this year's project don't worry, but if you have any thoughts or ideas to let us know now just add a comment to this blog post.