Sustainability
"Everything in nature is about balance and we believe that everything we do should try to reflect that balance"
Nature is at the heart of everything we do, from the way we grow our plants and hand harvest our botanicals to the way our gins are packaged. For us, being ‘sustainable’ isn’t just using less plastic and recycling where possible, although that is important, it really means working hand in hand with nature, a relationship that should be based on give and take. It is all about balance, and the collective outcome of that balance is sustainability.
As a Distillery Garden we specialise in our gin botanicals and flowers that we use for colouring our gins as well as native wild plants, all of which benefit nature. Our range of gins, honey and herbal teas follow the same ethos and are a celebration of all things wild.
In 2023, we received LACER funding from Midlothian Council to help us connect our onsite borehole to the rest of the site providing us with a sustainable source of water for the Garden and for the Distillery helping to reduce our carbon-footprint. We are always looking to improve our carbon-footprint and we are not perfect yet but we strive every day to be better. We are working with Climate Springboard and RBS to help us develop our Carbon Planner so we can measure how the changes we are making drive down our carbon footprint. Our short-term aim is to be Carbon-zero before 2025 but our longer-term goal is to be Carbon Negative by 2030.
To this end we have created an entire business that revolves around the health of the earth because although we are a distillery, café, and shop, most importantly we are a Garden, one that is truly rooted in nature.
OUR GARDEN
Our garden is completely natural, we use no chemicals, pesticides, or herbicides. It is created in a way so that it is sustainable as well as self-sufficient, this is also known as permaculture.
Our plants are hand-harvested, there is no machinery in the process, helping to reduce our carbon footprint. When soil is ploughed, it breaks up and releases the trapped carbon, therefore we limit digging in our gardens, which means, not only are we keeping the trapped carbon in the soil, but we are also actually capturing more.
We only use organic compost to ensure no chemicals touch our soil. In the garden, we limit our plastic consumption to only using recyclable plastic pots and offering discounts when these are returned. We have planted trees and juniper as hedging and allow wild corridors between the cultivated areas of the garden to encourage wildlife, carbon capture and soil health.
OUR BEES
Since the start of our journey in 2012, we have always had bees at the Garden and our 6 hives produce fragrant and pesticide-free honey which we use in some of our gins and sell some in our Shop.
Most importantly though, we garden specifically for our bees well-being. We keep wild corridors in our garden, where the grass isn’t obsessively cut and ‘weeds’ can prosper and grow.
We embrace these wild botanicals (weeds), such as the dandelion, not only for its beautiful sunny face that floods our lawns in Spring, but most importantly because it’s an early and critical source of pollen that is a life saver for the bees. We even use these wild plants in some of our gins and our Wild Gin celebrates this heritage.
OUR PRODUCTS & PRODUCTION
Our labels are made with 30% grass and 70% virgin pulp. This material is manufactured without the use of any chemicals, so compared to normal labels, ours require 97% less energy and 99% less water to be produced. This results in CO2 savings of around 20%.
We use viscose shrink bands to seal our bottles because they are biodegradable. All our shipping materials only consist of paper which is completely recyclable.
