At Wade Ceramics, we’re always keen to improve our environmental practices. Not all industrial manufacturing is damaging to the environment; at Wade, we are conscientious about running our production line in a sustainable way that is as eco-friendly as possible.
Re-using broken pieces of ceramic for artistic and home renovation projects is widespread, but we like to take things further. That’s why we practice sustainable manufacturing by recycling waste heat, waste water and excess clay for maximum use. We also save on road miles – and associated emissions – by always trying to source our raw materials locally. And that’s not all. Our porcelain is lead-free (Proposition 65), 100% food-safe and ISO9001:2015 certified. We simply wouldn’t have it any other way.
Wade Ceramics has a culture of ‘reduce, re-use, recycle’. Combining the practices below gives us a manufacturing process we can be proud of. Looking to the future, we will further reduce our ecological impact as we continue to strive for a greater sustainable culture in our work environment.
The heat generated from the kilns’ exhaust stacks and compressors is reused to dry products, heat the factory and warm the products in certain production areas.
Our effluent treatment plant recycles the factory’s water, removing only the sludge from site. This enables us to reuse the water to clean down the machinery every day.
The raw materials used in our manufacturing process are supplied in reusable packaging. We return the empty packs to the supplier so that they can be refilled and reduce the amount of single-use packaging. The packaging we use for our own products has the least amount of card as possible. Any card we do use is purely for protection and is unprinted and recycled. More often than not, our products are bulk packed on pallets for ease of handling.
Our excess clay is either returned to the supplier or recycled by Wade using our own system. When returned to the supplier, the material is returned to us in a usable state.
Sometimes, a product which has already been glazed or fired gets broken or is rejected. These pieces are taken by a local tile manufacturer and ground down to dust. This gets mixed with the virgin materials and is used to manufacture tiles. These pieces can also be crushed and used for hardcore. Plaster moulds can be crushed and used for dry walling (plasterboard).
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