Green thinking - Sustainability pledge

In 2019 we signed a company-wide pledge to work to reduce, and ultimately eliminate, the use of single-use plastic at Phyllis Court by 2024.

By joining the MIA campaign called “#20percentless”, we are part of a collective that aims to “educate customers, influence the supply chain and effect change to this systemic and complex issue”. Other businesses including Olympia London, Alton Towers, King’s College Cambridge,Elite Hotels and Holiday Inn have also signed up.

At Phyllis Court we were already taking action to minimise our impact on the environment. The campaign gives us guidelines to work within and allows us to benchmark our progress against others in the industry. We have already removed plastic bottles, pens, stirrers, cups, glasses and cutlery from the Club. We have straws and pens made of corn starch rather than plastic, biodegradable “veg ware” non-plastic cups, and for events water is served in reusable glass bottles rather than plastic ones. We don’t give away any promotional items made of single-use plastic, and we removed the use of cellophane for our charity Christmas cards. At Christmas we introduced 100% recycled Christmas crackers that contained no single-use plastic for all our Club and Interest Group events.

We served more than 1000 Christmas dinners to Members alone in December 2019, and these environmentally friendly crackers meant we were able to avoid 1000 single-use plastic items ultimately ending up in landfill or in our waterways.

It’s not just with regard to plastic that we are environmentally conscious. Our printed literature is produced on Forestry Commission Accredited paper. In Cromwell’s Fine Dining we worked with suppliers based within a 10-mile radius of the Club – where possible. We will also be sourcing merchandise from local and sustainable suppliers to reduce its carbon footprint. We want to consider the full lifecycle of a product, including travel and its disposal before using it at Phyllis Court. 

Lucinda Mitchell, the campaign lead at Phyllis Court, commented: “I hope that by making our business more environmentally friendly, we will be able to also influence our supply chains, so that they too are more environmentally conscious.The environment is something I am personally passionate about and I’m delighted that Phyllis Court is committed to operating in an environmentally friendly way. There is still more to do, but we have made great progress to date and we will continue to make positive changes.”