Sustainability

Here at Sheds Direct Ireland, we are committed to sustainability in many forms. Since we opened our doors years ago, we have made drastic changes to the business to become more sustainable; from sourcing local products to reducing plastic-use and more, we have made giant strides to better ourselves in this area. Today, we’ll highlight some of the big changes we’ve made.

 

Reducing plastic

When we first launched, all of our sheds had various pieces of plastic built-into the design. This was obviously, pretty wasteful. It’s hard to imagine that the plastic air vents on our older sheds would ever see another use. So, Alan and Louise designed sheds that required considerably less plastic.

Our Steel Sheds now have built-in vents, rather than plastic lined ones.

 

Each shed previously had four plastic vents. The new sheds still have four vents, they just have no plastic in them – and since the deisgn has been updated, they also let in less rain! On top of this, our Premium sheds no longer features plastic gutters and outlet spouts; They’ve been redesigned to not need them, reducing single-use plastic even further. While it may not sound like a lot, these changes this will result in a reduction of approximately 5,000 kgs of plastic a year!

While many of our sheds, like the Classic Range still have plastic door handles, this is something that we are looking to address in the future also. In fact, our newest range, the Mammoth Range features doors that are moulded in a way that doesn’t require handles at all. These doors are sturdy, support a padlock and have zero plastic associated with them.

 

Packaging

Another area of concern here was the packaging of our sheds. Previously, our sheds came in cardboard boxes, which were packed with styrofoam and wrapped in sheets of thin plastic. By using recycled and recyclable cardboard in their places, we’ve cut down a major source of waste in our packing.

As for the external packaging, we now use 50% less banding than we did in 2022. The banding we use is not currently recyclable, however we are looking into finding a suitable alternative that will keep the boxes together correctly. If the banding doesn’t work and the product gets destroyed in transit, that’s a whole lot more waste, right there.

The tape used on the outside of the boxes is also made from 100% recycled materials.

 

Plastic Sheds

We’ve never sold plastic sheds here at Sheds Direct Ireland. There are two reasons for this:

1. Plastic Sheds are exceptionally wasteful with regards to plastic
2. They’re pure rubbish

I can’t express correctly how rubbish plastic sheds are. They’re Wendy-Houses for grown ups, but they generate more condensation that a kettle beside a window. On top of that, the things are practically magnets for slugs and everything your storing will be affected by damp. So while we’d like to get on our high-horse and say that the only reason that we don’t stock them is on sustainability grounds, that would be incorrect – We also don’t sell them because they are utter plops.

 

Local Suppliers and Materials

We use local suppliers for all our products, where possible. This cuts down on carbon waste generate by imports and it means that we support local businesses too. Most of our wood and ply is sourced through Murdocks builders suppliers, through their Finglas site. The screws that we use are not produced in Ireland, but we get them from Lithuania. Similarly, there are no Inverter paraffin heater manufactuers on the island, but we use a Belgian supplier to keep us stocked up.

Where possible, we try to use Guaranteed Irish companies, like ourselves.

 

Digital Brochures

In mid-2023, we finally offered our Brochures as a digital download. This was inarguably the biggest use of paper across the business. During the Summer of 2022, we were printing over 1,000 pages of brochures a week. Many of these brochures didn’t make it past the coffee shop next door, and they were often found piled up in the bin there. Which, let’s be honest, wasn’t great.

To combat this, we plonked out a QR code at our for our customers to download their own version of our brochures at the front of house. We have them on our website and we can even WhatsApp the brochures on request to any interested customer. This has unsurprisingly drastically reduced the amount of paper purchased by the business. While not everyone uses the codes, (particularly the older generation) enough do to make a notable difference.

 

Recycling

Where possible, we don’t fill landfill with our waste.

St Margarets recycling is used for recycling our metal sheets. Through them, these pieces see a second-life. We use Wilton Skips for wood recycling and again, this means that quite a lot of timber is repurposed and recycled into something useable, rather than left for the bin. The City Bin Co take our cardboard recycling from the warehouse, keeping it from the landfill.

 

Better, not perfect

We’re not going to say that ‘well, we’ve done it. We’re perfect!’, because it’s not really that easy. We are working to get better every day, but our heart is in the right place and we are moving in the right direction, always. We’ve made changes that have drastically reduced the amount of waste that we could have otherwise created and in many cases, it has benefited the product, the customer and us too.

We’ll keep on progressing, but if you have any suggestions that can help us, let us know by sending us an email.