Love Logs
Wood – the UK is a little different to the rest of world, and while FSC is possible, we have our own standards by law in the UK, and have doubled our woodland cover over the last 100 years as a result. Our firewood and cooking wood is produced from three sites in Herefordshire, the Cotswolds and Northamptonshire. All wood used on each site is typically sourced from 50 miles or less from the production site, although this has become more challenging in recent years. Every single load of timber the sites buy comes from a woodland under a management plan and can only be felled with the appropriate felling license linked to that plan. Essentially, British wood is sustainable by the system set up around it, and the low road miles make it close to carbon neutral. All of the kilns run on biomass with no fossil fuel energy used in production.
British charcoal – this is what we’re shipping to you next week as I think it’s a better immediate fit. All of our British charcoal is produced in Herefordshire, and the same laws apply to the timber, but typically the wood comes from more like 20 miles proximity to production. Again, all of the charcoal retorts run on biomass.
Spanish charcoal – our British charcoal is really stunning but over the last couple of years we’ve come to realise there is a limit to how much charcoal we can produce in the UK, we simply can’t make enough to meet demand due to the methods used in production. If you imagine a farming system that simply couldn’t produce enough of a product to meet demand, that’s the situation with British charcoal. So, as well as continuing to actively promote British charcoal, we’ve made it our mission to get consumers off cheap, unsustainable imports from South America, Asia and Africa and on to more sustainable options. Our Iberian Holm Oak Charcoal actually supports a farming ecosystem in Spain called Dehesa, which is an agroforestry method where oak trees are planted and managed in the grazing land of the Iberian pigs – there are 3 million hectares of Dehesa in Spain and they’re now protected environments. The oak trees can only be cut down when they’re diseased or at end of life and they are always replaced – so this charcoal is made of a by-product of a farming system, rather than the trees being cut down specifically for charcoal. We’re happy to hear your thoughts as to whether this is a fit or not for Edenmoor given it’s imported, or whether perhaps with some more information you might see it being a fit given it supports an ancient method of farming. Again, the charcoal kilns are run on biomass.
We take sustainability very seriously but like with farming, we find quite often the big certification systems actually aren’t up to date, or don’t allow for certain very sustainable products.
We’re completely plastic free across our consumer facing operations, this was a given for us from the start.
