Embodied Carbon Statement, 2026 Update

Cradle-to-gate (A1 to A3) assessment

British Recycled Plastic products are manufactured in the UK from high recycled-content polyolefin polymer, using electricity drawn from renewable sources. Based on data aggregated across our UK manufacturing partners, the cradle-to-gate embodied carbon of our recycled polymer sections is approximately 0.38 kg CO₂e per kilogram of finished material.

That figure covers raw material supply (A1), transport to the manufacturing facility (A2), and manufacturing and extrusion itself (A3). It has been aggregated across partners operating to EN 15804-aligned methodology and weighted by annual material throughput, so the number reflects real production volumes rather than a best-case example.

What this means in practice

Take a Denholme picnic table, one of our heaviest products at around 106 kg. Its cradle-to-gate embodied carbon works out at roughly 40 kg CO₂e per table. Spread across the 25-year guarantee we offer on every product, that comes down to about 1.6 kg CO₂e per guaranteed year of service life. The guarantee is the key number here, because the guarantee is the commitment; actual service life in the field is routinely considerably longer.

Lifetime comparison with softwood timber

A softwood picnic table of broadly similar footprint weighs somewhere in the region of 50 to 60 kg and, left outdoors without substantial ongoing treatment, can be expected to last 5 to 7 years before structural failure or replacement becomes necessary. Taking a middle-of-the-road six-year lifespan, a site specifying softwood would need roughly four tables over the same 25-year window that a single Denholme covers.

Using conservative published figures for cradle-to-gate softwood carbon intensity, those four tables come in at around 115 kg CO₂e across 25 years, or 4.6 kg CO₂e per year. The Denholme, on the same basis, produces roughly a third of that lifetime embodied carbon.

And that comparison is generous to softwood. It doesn’t include the repainting, staining or preservative treatments that softwood furniture requires to reach even the lifespan assumed above; it doesn’t include the transport emissions involved in delivering replacement tables; it doesn’t account for waste handling when the old ones come out of service; and it ignores the maintenance labour that, while not a carbon figure per se, sits in the total cost of ownership alongside it. Factor any of these in and the gap widens.

Manufacturing energy

The primary UK extrusion facilities supplying British Recycled Plastic operate on renewable electricity, which is the single largest reason our A3 figure lands where it does. A comparable extrusion process on a grid-average or fossil-heavy energy mix would produce a materially higher number.

System boundary transparency

The 0.38 kg CO₂e per kg figure covers A1 to A3 only. It does not include transport to the end customer, installation, the in-use phase, or end-of-life treatment. We’ve drawn the boundary this way because it matches EN 15804 convention and allows genuine like-for-like comparison with other published cradle-to-gate figures, rather than quietly including or excluding stages to flatter the result.

Continuous improvement

Our commitment is to reduce embodied carbon further, to increase recycled content where the polymer chemistry allows, to publish our data transparently rather than selectively, and to update these figures as further verified information becomes available from our manufacturing partners.

Authorised by: Jason Elliott, Managing Director Low Carbon Products Ltd, trading as British Recycled Plastic 16 February 2026

Shipping, and why we design the way we do

Transport to the end customer sits outside the A1 to A3 boundary, so it isn’t counted in the 0.38 kg CO₂e per kg figure above. That doesn’t mean we ignore it. Every product in the range is designed from the outset to palletise efficiently and to ship in the smallest possible footprint, because the cheapest and lowest-carbon pallet space is the one you don’t use.

The Denholme picnic table is a good worked example. Semi-assembled, five tables stack onto a double pallet. Fully assembled, the same vehicle space holds only two tables on a quad pallet. Per table delivered, that works out at roughly a fifth of the transport carbon we’d otherwise be pushing out onto the road, and the same logic, applied to benches, planters, Parklets and the rest of the range, is built into every product decision we make.

There’s a practical benefit alongside the carbon one. A double pallet can be offloaded from the delivery vehicle using a tail-lift, which most sites can accommodate. A quad pallet needs a forklift on site to take it off the lorry, which many sites, particularly schools, pubs and smaller public sector locations, simply don’t have. So the approach lowers delivered carbon per unit and makes the product deliverable to more sites without specialist handling equipment. The short assembly on arrival is a fair trade for both.

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