Businesses

There are two ways.

1. Join your local Plastic Free Community

Simply find your local community on our map, drop them a message and tell them you’d like to become a Plastic Free Champion. They’ll sign you up and work with you to achieve the award which will also contribute to your local community’s Plastic Free status.

2. What if there is no Community near me?

No problem. Just sign up direct with us and we’ll award you the status from SAS HQ. Who knows! You may start the plastic free movement where you live!

The SAS Plastic Free Champion award is specifically for independent, locally owned SME businesses. If larger companies want to get involved; for example, national chains or multi-nationals, then they can join up with their local community as Community Allies and support them through staff engagement and supporting events.

We also look at the wider environmental impact of businesses when assessing the award, so businesses which have high impact or a wider single use plastic issue to tackle would need to demonstrate a clear commitment to change and action to become eligible for the award.

Businesses from many different sectors can become Plastic Free Champions. Our Business Toolkit gives advice specifically on hospitality, hair and beauty, holiday accommodation, leisure and office-based businesses.

To achieve the Plastic Free Champion Award a business needs to remove at least three single-use plastic items (eg. plastic bags, coffee cups and plastic drinks bottles) and show a commitment to tackling any others present in the business going forwards. Once this is in place, businesses get a Plastic Free Champion plaque and certificate to highlight their great work and tell customers and the wider community. It’s a launch-pad to do more if they are able to, and plenty do!

We are working to reduce the impact of single use, throwaway culture. So for us the first line of action has to be to reduce the amount of items we use in the first place. We are looking for businesses to adopt a refuse, refill and reuse mentality. Therefore, for the Champion award, we do not accept swapping to biodegradable OR compostable plastics. But there will be some instances where it is appropriate to swap to a more environmentally friendly alternative and some compostable alternatives do actually compost! So just tell us the alternatives they use as you apply for the champion award and we’ll work out the rest.

Yes! Just register with us here and we will set you up with a business dashboard and send you the business toolkit with advice and tips on how to achieve the award. When you are ready to apply just fill in the application on your business dashboard and ww look forward to awarding you Plastic Free Champion status!