10 Union Street – Bees, Composting and Green Initiatives
At 10 Union Street we are committed to reducing our carbon footprint and making sure that we leave a positive impact on the planet in the work that we do here. Below we have described the simple everyday ways we do this.
Bees & Wild Flowers
Our rooftops at 10 Union Street have become home to not only an abundance of wild flowers and herbs but also our very own colony of bees. From spring last year we have raised two hives of bees on our rooftop garden to help the pollination of our wild flowers and to increase local biodiversity. Our plan by next May will be to harvest our own 10 Union Street honey which we will use in our food & beverage offerings as well as making this available to buy in our onsite Café. We are currently in discussion with ‘Bankside Urban Forest’ an initiative put together by Better Bankside to transform the network of streets and spaces across Bankside, to help us develop our gardens further.
Café
In our Cafe we use Crude Coffee as our supplier. Crude, like us, are committed to sustainability and ensuring flavour is delivered in its ‘purest, crudest form’. For our hot food options we have stepped away from meat options and are embracing a completely vegetarian and plant based hot food menu, with the likes of vegetarian moussaka and vegetable cottage pie featuring.
Composting & Coffee Grounds
We put all of our food waste onsite into our ‘hot-composting’ scheme. We are currently looking into finding compostable bags to store these in, so that members of the college and the public can collect a bag to use at home, we will also be donating bags of compost to the Bankside Urban Forest project. For the time being however this compost is not going to waste and is being used to fertilise our rooftop garden.
Our coffee grounds are following the same journey and are being offered to anyone at the college who would like to use these in their gardens.
Plastic Free
Our front of house operation at 10 Union Street is COMPLETELY plastic free, something that we are immensely proud to boast about here! All of our food packaging, coffee cups, coffee lids and drinks receptacles are made out of recyclable or compostable material, meaning we have no unnecessary waste onsite. We are currently working with Better Bankside also to see if we can further stretch this even further throughout the site.
The Building
The building itself of 10 Union Street also embraces our green initiatives. All electricity in the building has been switched to 100% renewable energy provisions. Our new cooling, heating and lighting systems have significantly reduced the CO2 emissions and running costs. These new systems and changes in building operations reduced CO2 emissions by 43% compared to the old system used.
We have plenty more green initiatives in the pipeline, so please do keep an eye out for these; and if you would like any more information regarding this venue please contact us at events@10unionstreet.co.uk
