Without doubt, the Covid-19 pandemic has completely transformed the way we live, over the last year and for some time to come. Every aspect of our lives has been impacted, including how we approach the design of our outdoor spaces; as we move on from initial emergency measures, there’s a growing interest in and need for more and better designed external environments.

As a manufacturer of outdoor furniture, you might think that Vestre’s sole focus is to sell as many benches, litter bins or planters as possible, but you’d be wrong. For a supplier, we take a different approach to business. We also bear in mind the social, as well as environmental or economic aspects of sustainability.

We’re proud to have operated carbon neutral production for over 10 years and we offer extremely lengthy warranties on our products (for example lifetime on all steel elements against corrosion) to minimise our use of resources. And we take a holistic approach manufacturing products that have an infinite life through refurbishment and availability of spares etc. 

This spring we launched our new products in our brand new inspiration book/catalogue, which has been shortlisted in the D&AD Awards this year. It features a combination of evocative imagery, updates on sustainability, technical information, and prices: if you’d like to order a hard copy please let us know at uk@vestre.com (link to the PDF).

We have a couple of firsts for 2021: we’re very excited to showcase our expanding International presence and have included over 50 projects from every country where we’re active. 

But, most importantly, we’re publishing environmental data on every single product we manufacture and are proud to be the very first outdoor furniture company to provide this data. We list the carbon footprint or global warming potential of each product, displayed as carbon equivalents (kg CO2), and the total energy used to produce each product (in MJ); both are cradle to gate (A1-A3) ie for the production stage:

A1 Raw material extraction and supply

A2 Transport to manufacturing plant

A3 Manufacturing and fabrication

We’re aware that, as the only manufacturer in our sector to publish this information, there’s not yet an opportunity for our customers to compare and contrast with information from others in order to understand whether the data is relatively good or bad. However, it does allow comparisons between our ranges to be made for the lowest environmental impact.

We have the utmost confidence that we are doing everything we can to keep our impact as low as possible but, of course, there is always room for improvement, and we keep a constant eye on opportunities throughout our entire operations. For example, we’ve pre-ordered from the first batch of HYBRIT steel - a new project that brings together mine owners, steel producers and industry experts to reduce virgin ore in blast furnaces fuelled only by hydrogen. This will be the first fossil-free steel to be manufactured from virgin ore, to be released on the market in 2026. These kinds of initiatives are the only way we can continue to drive down our impact and uncouple it from our increasing production as we continue to expand our global presence.

For more on our transparent approach to sustainability, please download our most recent sustainability report below.