The Glades wins award for single-use plastics campaign

The team at The Glades Shopping Centre are celebrating afterreceiving a prestigious environmental award for its single-use plastics campaign.

The Bromley centre received a ‘Silver’ Green Apple Award for Environmental Best Practice after launching its sustainability project ‘Saying No to Single-Use Plastic’, earlier this year.

The Glades’ campaign aims to raise awareness among its customers and retailers about the negative environmental effects of single-use plastics.

To open the conversation about plastic consumption and disposal, the team at the Bromley shopping centre displayed all the bottles, food packaging and coffee cups thrown away each day in the centre in a large, glass container in the mall. Shoppers were invited to the add their own single-use plastic to it, which created a visual statement that allowed visitors to watch the waste building up.

To incentivise the scheme and show its support for the global Earth Day initiative, The Glades also gave away 2,000 reusable aluminium bottles to encourage shoppers to replace their plastic bottles with an environmentally-friendly alternative.

Every café and restaurant at the shopping centre also pledged its commitment to the cause by signing up to the centre’s free, water refill scheme. Over the course of the four-week campaign, more than 400kg of plastic was collected.

Held annually by The Green Organisation, the Green Apple Environment Awards recognise, reward and promote the very best in environmental practice around the world. Members of the shopping team were invited to the Houses of Parliament to receive the award.

Mark Haynes, director of The Glades, said: “I’m extremely proud of what has been achieved by The Glades with this brilliant, thought-provoking campaign. Receiving this wonderful Green Apple Environment Award is testament to the team’s determination to ensure the space we occupy in the world has a brighter, sustainable future.

“We are incredibly grateful to all our retailers and visitors for being on board with the campaign and supporting our message, as without their backing we wouldn’t have been recognised in this most fantastic way.”