Crown Paints is celebrating ten years of its award-winning earthbalance sustainability scheme, which aims to limit its impact on the environment.

The earthbalance scheme sets out the company’s commitment to being more sustainable and less wasteful.

It touches on aspects such as manufacturing and packaging and applies to all staff and operations at Crown’s two UK manufacturing plants in Darwen and Hull as well as its network of more than 150 Crown Decorating Centres in the UK.

Thanks to the earthbalance scheme, Crown has reduced its overall electricity consumption by 15 per cent, reduced packaging waste by 15 per cent, recycled more than 800 tonnes of paint cans and donated 112 benches made using recycled paint cans through social enterprise NIMTECH.

Crown has also reduced the amount of waste going to landfill with 65% of waste being reused or recycled in some way, including 39,000 litres of paint.

Last year Crown became the first paint manufacturer in the UK to launch paint containers made from 100 per cent recycled post-consumer waste (PCW) plastic, which marks a significant improvement to the plastic paint containers manufactured from 25 per cent recycled plastic currently available in the UK.