Homes | Wickes

At Wickes we aren’t only looking at ways to reduce our own environmental impact, we also want to help our customers create more sustainable homes by providing sustainable products and services that are responsibly sourced.

According to the British Retail Consortium, the UK's homes contribute around a quarter of the UK's carbon emissions, and the challenge of retrofitting these homes with sustainable technologies remains one of the largest in achieving the UKs net zero targets. The UK is also facing cost of living increases that make energy efficient homes even more essential to combat rising energy costs. Our Homes pillar will look to help address these challenges.

We are focused on three main goals:

Eliminate all unnecessary packaging and all packaging to be easy to recycle or reuse by 2025
50% of our own brand products classified as sustainable
Reduced in-use emissions of our products

Helping the nation make their homes more sustainable

We sell a wide range of products that are both responsibly sourced, and that support sustainable homes and living.

We partner with the Energy Saving Trust to provide advice and guidance to customers on how to make their homes more energy efficient.

We have made it easier for customers to access these products with the launch of our Energy Efficient Home on our website, with advice on sustainable living and energy reduction for all rooms in the house with a click to purchase option for the most important products.

Wickes Energy Efficient Home

Timber makes up around 45% of our business. We have strict requirements to ensure we only source products that are safe, fit for purpose and which meet or exceed our customers expectations. We require each timber product that enters our supply chain to comply with all applicable legislation including FSC and PEFC, and require full chain of custody on all timber and joinery products. We carry out regular inspections of our suppliers, conduct a supplier risk assessment every two years, and conduct SEDEX ethical audits to complement our process. This strategy means that all of our timber is responsibly sourced, with 99.8% being certified under FSC and PEFC.

We recognise that peat is an essential habitat for the natural environment, valuable to not only wildlife, but also providing flooding protection, and acting as a carbon sink to fight climate change. We are committed to moving away from peat in our products and are working closely with our suppliers to develop sustainable alternatives that will perform satisfactorily at a value our customers have come to expect. We have developed a peat free alternative for our own brand compost and our current target is to remove peat from our products by the end of 2023.

Wickes is one of the largest installers of Kitchens and Bathrooms in the UK, and we work with thousands of customers to design, deliver, and install thousands of kitchens and bathrooms every year.

We are working to understand how we can integrate sustainable thinking into our existing services, such as kitchen and bathroom design, as well as offering customers a new range of services to support their own sustainable ambitions.

Every time a new kitchen or bathroom is installed this produces waste, in the form of both the product packaging and the removal of the previous kitchen and bathroom units. We recycle 97% of all the waste created during the installation of a ‘Do-it-for-me’ kitchen or bathroom project and are working with our installation waste management partners to explore how we can further reduce the waste from all our installation projects.

Packaging

As a multichannel retailer, with thousands of products of all shapes and sizes, Wickes will always require packaging to protect our products, and to offer customers the essentials for their homes. We recognise that we need to work hard to improve and reduce packaging in our business, and have set ourselves some challenging packaging improvement and reduction targets over the next few years.

To eliminate all unnecessary packaging across our business by 2023
All our packaging will be easy to recycle, reuse or compost by 2025
50% of all of our packaging materials will come from recycled materials by 2025

To support these targets we have a new packaging management system, Valpac, which allows us to monitor and manage the packaging within our business and work with our suppliers and colleagues to understand and reduce its impact.

Understanding our customers' needs

We know we need to do more to support sustainable homes in the UK and this starts with understanding the needs of our all our customers, Local Trade, DIY and DIFM

We conduct ‘customer closeness’ focus groups to better understand their needs and concerns, especially on climate change and the environment. Through this research we have established that although home improvers and tradespeople are concerned about climate change, in reality few homes actually have available sustainable products installed. There is an opportunity for retailers to play a far greater role in educating and supporting consumers and through continued engagement with customers we can focus our products, ranges, and services on what they want and need.