Food miles, bio-fuels, supermarket dominance, organic food, rising prices, fair-trade, peak oil, the credit crunch… Today’s consumer faces a bewildering number of issues and problems; fortunately there are companies that attempt to offer a solution to some of these concerns. Riverford Organics is one such company.

The Riverford brand evolved from local man, Guy Watson selling a wheelbarrow of his own wares on Totnes Highstreet, to the national delivery set up it is today, with four organic franchises delivering to nearly 40,000 homes. But as the company has grown, so has its environmental impact; a fact that Watson has been determined to combat by searching out sensible, pragmatic resolutions to problems, rather than just "blowing with the wind, and the environmental trends".

Recent graduate, Mark Howard, has been employed in a sustainable development role as part of a Knowledge Transfer Project (KTP) with Exeter University in order to meet this need. Howard explains: “I'm here to take the university's expertise and improve the way the business runs, while expanding the understanding of the university in how to apply its knowledge in a real world situation.” Once the project was approved, a grant was handed over to the university KTP managers, with the company paying a contribution towards running the project, and employing Howard as its associate.

Riverford wanted to understand more about its environmental and socio-economic impact. Using a pre-planned box from a locally sourced supplier travelling on a pre-planned route, it believed it must be more sustainable than a hyper-convenient, over-supplied supermarket shop. However, as Howard argues, a direct, overall comparison is currently nigh on impossible due to the wide variety of variables and accounting boundaries. None-the-less, he has determined that, in terms of carbon accounting, Riverford has taken into consideration “a much more realistic proportion of what we’re responsible for than the supermarkets, who have not even counted their packaging.

"When you consider that 17 per cent of our carbon footprint is packaging, and that we’ve been shown to be ‘better than best practice’ in an Envirowise study regarding our packaging system, it’s quite worrying to think that a supermarket doesn’t feel responsible for that.”

Due to the very nature of a veggie box scheme, the Riverford model also takes into account delivery to customers’ homes. Howard points to research that “has shown that home delivery is about 70 per cent more carbon efficient than people doing individual shopping trips." However, transport does still account for 13 per cent of Riverford’s carbon footprint. Having refused to go down the path of bio-fuels and establishing that waste oil simply couldn’t cover its demands, the Riverford team has been left in a quandary. “Biomethane is something that we’re considering,” says Howard, “but at the moment it’s really hard to scrub bio-gas (from anaerobic digestion) into bio-methane, but it is something that we’re investigating.”

Electric vehicles are also a less-than-perfect solution, coming in at around £40,000 per van. Riverford does, however, have a couple of its devoted employees delivering by bike through central London. Every box it delivers in this fashion has a 25 per cent smaller footprint, helping to offset some of their other deliveries. “We’re also looking at fuel efficiency, we’re looking at clever aerodynamics for our trucks, we’re looking at more fuel efficient driver training for all of our drivers, and we’re undergoing a green fleet review at the moment with the Energy Saving Trust”.

But while the overall impact of the transport has been surprisingly low, the greatest offender of all has been its packaging. With a four per cent higher carbon footprint than its transport, it was even more of a shock for Riverford to find that plastic – unlike cardboard – contributed little to this. While a move away from card would need to be tempered due to the nature of the material and the way it stores some of their vegetables, in terms of the delivery box, a more durable material – such as plastic – has been suggested, to promote extended usage. Howard is unsure of how the public will take to this.

The company is also looking at reducing the weight of its packaging, and has already slashed its paper punnets by 14-15 per cent. “Not only is the carbon footprint of that punett lower,” Howard reports, “but we've also redesigned it so that it stacks better onto a pallet, so you can get more onto a pallet and then obviously have less trips - so that's the kind of thing we are doing, and they’re recyclable with any local authority and they’re compostable.”

Howard has spent that past 18 months disseminating all aspects of the way the company works, retrofitting passive insulation and ventilation; installing reactive lighting; providing wormeries for the office; reclaiming heat from refrigeration systems for an underfloor heating system; introducing cycle to work schemes; reprogramming fridges (by installing smart programming to one fridge on the Devon site to switch off the fan when it hits optimum temperature, the company has saved one per cent of the electricity used over the entire site); franchising out network farms and holding regular meetings with staff to gain on-the-job input. “We’ve also done a lot of work to look at vegetable temperature on the doorstep, and tried to find a low energy solution to keeping vegetables cool there. We’ve started selling two products, called the eco-cool safe and the eco-cool blanket, which help keep vegetables between five and 10 degrees cooler than if they were left outside in the sun normally. One of them is simply a hollowed out wooden box full of soil!”

Perhaps most interesting – and potentially controversial – though, is Howard’s decision to move the company back to conventional polythene bags from the oxo-degradable bags that they had been using for the past few years. “The initial decision was that this oxo-degradable plastic’s not so hot, because it’s just a conventional plastic so you can’t actually compost it; you can’t recycle it and, because it degrades, it isn’t great as often recycled plastic goes into things like plumbing pipe and other critical applications so that would undermine the market for recycled products. Really, the only thing you can actually do with it is stick it into a landfill site!”

According to Howard, biodegradable bags also presented similar problems in terms of undermining the recyclate market, but also, for this usage, would be too energy intensive to produce. “We decided we could recycle the bags that we send out because we have distribution vans that bring back the boxes anyway, so we could just bring back these plastic bags too.”

The journey to making the company run more sustainably hasn’t been a smooth one, but with its KTP nearly complete, Riverford can proudly boast of its sustainable business model, and its position as an early mover in the green revolution.