At Connect Vending, sustainability isn’t just a buzzword it’s embedded into everything we do. From ethically sourced coffee to electric vehicles, from solar-powered offices to community food redistribution, we’re committed to reducing our environmental impact while delivering exceptional vending solutions.
1. Driving sustainable coffee consumption
Coffee solutions form a core part of our business, and we are passionate about delivering a great cup of ethically sourced coffee every time. With the production, distribution and consumption of coffee comes many opportunities to introduce more sustainable and eco-friendly practices.
Our sustainable coffee bean suppliers are certified by the Rainforest Alliance, helping coffee farmers around the world to cultivate responsibly grown coffee beans in a way which minimises environmental impact and protects our most important, and most at risk, ecosystems. Many other eco-friendly consumables that we stock in our hot drinks machines are Fairtrade certified.
In 2014, Connect Vending transitioned away from plastic cups to paper cups, which has decreased the number of single-use plastic cups from going to landfill. Although our hot drink cups are much more sustainable than their plastic counterparts, we understand that they are not fully recyclable due to their non-paper internal linings which is why we always recommend to our clients that they promote a reusable coffee mug scheme and embrace zero-waste coffee solutions. To tackle this, in 2022, we introduced a dedicated cup recycling scheme through Grundon which has resulted in us recycling 85% of our single use cups.
2. Reducing our carbon emissions
We are working hard to reduce our carbon footprint by minimising both the direct emissions from our fleet and the indirect emissions from our warehouse and office energy supply. As of 2022, our fleet now includes several electric vehicles to help reduce the CO2 emissions emitted. While a fully electric fleet isn’t yet viable for our operations, we’re taking proactive steps to minimize emissions from our conventional vehicles. We regularly upgrade our fleet to ensure compliance with the latest emission standards, preventing older vehicles from producing excessive emissions.
Additionally, all our diesel vehicles are AdBlue compatible, making unavoidable long-distance journeys more sustainable. Our commitment to reducing emissions extends to our warehouse operations too. In 2025, we upgraded our forklift from diesel to fully electric, eliminating harmful emissions from our daily warehouse activities and creating a cleaner, quieter working environment for our operations team.
In 2012, we took a significant step towards renewable energy by installing solar panels on our office building. The clean energy collected from these panels powers the AC and heating units throughout our office, reducing our reliance on grid electricity. To maximise efficiency, we upgraded the solar panel inverter in May 2025, ensuring optimal performance and energy capture.
In 2023 we completed a full transition to energy-efficient LED lighting across our entire office. This comprehensive upgrade has significantly reduced our electricity consumption while improving workplace lighting quality.
3. Reducing our resource consumption
At Connect Vending, we are committed to removing any non-necessary printed paper, cardboard and plastic consumption across our business. Which is why we have digitalised 95% of our office processes which has resulted in us saving hundreds of pieces of paper. By digitising our onboarding process, we are saving 200 pieces of paper per new starter, whilst also reducing the energy consumed by printers throughout the building.
Due to the nature of our business, we see a large quantity of cardboard and packaging entering our warehouse from the food and vending machine packaging. As part of our sustainability initiative, we bale the carboard waste and send it off to be recycled off site, this ensures the waste is not sent to landfill and is turned into recycled cardboard products instead. This initiative is companywide, so when our operators go to sites to stock up the food options, they also collect the packaging and bring it back to the office to be recycled.
Where possible, we try to refurbish and reuse machines but in some cases the machines cannot be repaired, in these instances we use a metal scrap company called DCS Scrap who melt down and recycle the metal to make new products.
In recent years our operations team have been working on making their processes more sustainable. As part of our fully managed vending package our operators deep clean the machines, this was previously creating a lot of plastic waste, so we made the switch to reusable cleaning bottles. Each operator is given two bottles, for sanitisation and glass cleaning, which are refilled weekly. This process has prevented 3,500 bottles from going to landfill every year.
Most of our machines only accept card or contactless payment methods, but there are still a few machines that accept cash, so when our operators go to collect the money from sites, they use reusable fabric cash bags rather than single-use plastic bags.
4. Tackling Food Waste
Food waste is unavoidable, but at Connect Vending, we are working on reducing the amount of food that is thrown away by working with charities to redistribute the food across the community. The main charity we work with is Olio, which is a sharing app that collect the food from our sites and redistributes it across the local community to help families in need. Over a quarter, we have worked with Olio to feed 206 households which in turn saved 578.39kl of water and avoided 336.91kg of CO2 from being emitted into the environment. In areas where Olio is not available, our operators donate the products to food banks.
5. Working with sustainable suppliers
Our machine suppliers and consumable partners play a vital role in driving sustainability throughout the vending industry. Each of our suppliers hold a ISO 14001 Environmental Management Certificate, and have their own goals set to reduce their carbon footprint and improve product design fundamentals over the next five to ten years.
In recent years, machine manufacturers have brought many technological innovations to the vending machine industry, which have delivered substantial improvements to machine energy efficiency. These machine manufacturers have also delivered refrigeration innovations, moving from HFC based refrigeration to climate-friendly natural refrigeration alternatives.
Our food and drink suppliers have also made big changes to their supply chain and packaging approaches, especially when it comes to removing plastic packaging across their ranges. In 2022, one of our fresh food suppliers, Simply Lunch, released new packaging for their sandwich range that contained no single use plastics, which will collectively remove more than 8 tonnes of plastic from their sandwich packaging every year.
Where possible our Wholesale team use sustainable and local couriers to deliver our wholesale products and use products from brands with a strong sustainable presence such as illy and Eatfruit. We also use local dairies to deliver our milk products. The way this works is that our milk suppliers have facilities based all over the region, and they use local couriers to collect the milk from the closest facility and distribute it.
At Connect Vending, we’re always looking at ways to improve sustainability across our supply chain and are excited by future advances in the industry. Ready to partner with a vending provider that shares your environmental values? Contact us today to learn how our sustainable vending solutions can support your organisation’s green goals.
