Sourcing with integrity

When you buy a pet from us, you can be sure it was bred in comfortable and caring surroundings. We only source pets from suppliers who fulfil the 5 basic freedoms laid down in the Animal Welfare Act 2006, and we regularly inspect our suppliers to make sure they meet our high standards and that they have the right attitude towards animals.

We check our suppliers around the world against the ethical trading code we’ve developed, based on the Ethical Trading Initiative. And for our own-label products, we work closely with our suppliers to make sure that the social development and welfare of their employees are protected.

Caring for animals beyond our stores

For our products in store, we take great care in matching owners to our pets, so that lifelong homes are established. But not every pet out there is as lucky. And since we firmly believe that every pet has the right to a happy, healthy life (especially if its first home didn’t work out), we’ve undertaken 2 major initiatives to help less fortunate pets:

• We set up our own charity, Support Adoption for Pets. In 2009, we raised over £950,000 and made donations of over £100,000 to help support local rescue and re-homing centres, as well as national animal welfare organisations. We raise money through our own fundraising events, such as our national in-store fundraising weeks, our annual golf day and our Christmas conference for suppliers. We also raise funds by selling products such as our charity Christmas cards, our Bags for Life and our Trolley Coins.

• Our in-store colleagues work tirelessly to operate the Charity’s in-store adoption centres, helping to give homeless pets a second chance of happiness.

Sustainable retailing

We’ve always been committed to working in a way that minimises our impact on the environment. When we asked our colleagues, “How can we reduce waste?” at the beginning of 2009, we were inundated with interesting replies about how to become an even greener business. So here are a few examples of what we’ve been doing to help protect the world around us:

Recycling as much as possible

• We’ve been recycling plastic and cardboard for years.

• In May 2009, we launched an exciting new initiative which, over a 12 month period, reduced our landfill waste by a staggering 70%. That’s because we’ve finally found a company which can deal with all of our animal bedding waste—by recycling it! You see, when the food industry composts food waste, that waste can produce excessive amounts of nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas. But by adding our animal bedding to the process, much less nitrous oxide is produced, helping to neutralise the pH level. It’s been a costly investment for us, but we think
it is worth every penny.

Cutting down on packaging waste

Our goal is to generate as little waste as possible.. So here’s some of what we’re doing on packaging:

• After asking our customers what they wanted us to do about carrier bags, we have taken steps which have reduced the number we provided by a remarkable 21%. This was helped by the launch of our new charity, Bag for Life, of which sales have increased by 56%

• We now do environmental impact assessments on all of our own-label packaging as part of our product engineering process. Wherever possible, we use recyclable or bio-degradable materials.

• Not every positive change is visible, but they all matter. For example, we’ve reduced the thickness of the foil in our
packaging on a number of our products. You won’t notice it—but it’s there!

• We’re helping our suppliers to reduce the amount of outer packaging they use when delivering to our distribution centre. Where possible, we issue them with reusable plastic totes.

• Unfortunately, we can’t always change packaging in the way we’d like or as quickly as we’d like. For example, our Wainwright’s dry dog food bags have greaseproof linings, which means that the bags can’t be recycled. But we’re working on it.

Using less electricity

• In 2007, we asked the Carbon Trust to look at ways we could use less energy. Since then, we’ve been busy implementing many of their ideas. It’s meant investing quite a bit, but we’re already seeing a major reduction in the amount of power we use.

• Our big project for 2008 was the installation of sensor lighting at our national distribution centre—since then we’ve seen a 22% saving in our electricity use. Recently we also installed sensor lighting in the new extension at our support office (it’s still too early to see what impact that’s having, but we’ll let you know!).

• In 2008-2009 we trialled a number of lighting-control gizmos at 2 of our stores, to see what energy savings could be made. These have since been rolled out across all of our stores. We’ve also made some small changes, like installing photo-sensitive outdoor signage which switches off when the sun’s shining brightly. .

Becoming more fuel-efficient

• For the past few years we’ve really focused on getting more miles out of every litre of fuel used in our vehicles. In 2007 we were getting 2.65 kilometres per litre (kpl); we improved this to 2.72 kpl in 2008 and 2.93 in 2009. Our target for 2010 is 3.02. This means that our fleet is emitting 802 tonnes less CO2 per year.

• One of our great successes has been our ongoing driver training programme. Among other things, this teaches driving and braking techniques which help to improve fuel efficiency.

• We continue to introduce more aerodynamic (curved-roof) double-decker trailers into our fleet of lorries, which improves our fuel efficiency.

• By introducing double-decker trailers, we’ve managed to increase the number of cases we carry in our vehicles by 60%. In 2006 we averaged 2,000 cases per vehicle, but in 2008 we packed in a total of 3,000 cases. So that means fewer trips and less fuel used.

• Thanks to technology, we can plan our trips down to the finest detail. So if we’re making a delivery to a location near one of our suppliers, for example, we check whether we can bring anything back to our distribution centre—saving them the journey, and saving us all the fuel