Quality Garden Tools Blog

Bulldog Goes Green

Posted on 10/07/08 | Posted by The Fat Gardener

It is almost impossible to watch any gardening television programme these days without hearing the words ‘environment’, ‘organic’ and ‘green’ often in the same sentence. My children often make me feel like a chemical weapons dealer every time I sprinkle a couple of slug pellets around a treasured Hosta or even think about spraying a much-loved rose.

As a child I remember watching Gardener’s World with the late Percy Thrower who seemed to spray everything with chemicals – flowers, shrubs, roses, lawns all received toxic attention. Those bugs that were not killed by the downpour of chemical weaponry were no doubt exterminated by the profuse smoke produced by Percy’s ever-present pipe!

Percy Thrower was not a bad man, he was a great gardener, but our gardening culture has moved on. Geoff Hamilton introduced organic principles to his gardening and this trend continued with Alan Titchmarsh. Monty Don has been the greenest Gardener’s World presenter to date and with a new presenter to be announced we can only assume the trend will continue. Perhaps the new presenter will be Bill Oddie and Berryfields will be left to grow wild with Bill hiding in the long borders waiting for a robin or a hedgehog to appear!

Many garden tools manufacturers send us catalogues with copious amounts of information on how ‘green’ they are. Quality Garden Tools encourages all its suppliers to embrace green principles in order to protect our wider environment and it is true that almost all the companies we deal with have ‘cleaned up their acts’ over the last few years.

Bulldog Tools are a particular case in point. Over the last few years they have tried to find a renewable source of timber for their tool handles, but from suppliers who can also offer the very highest quality of Ash and Hickory. This quest led them in 2006 to become certified by the PEFC (Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification Schemes) a scheme which builds upon inter-governmental promotion of sustainable forest management. These schemes include a series of mechanisms supported by 149 governments in the world covering 85% of the world's forest area, meaning that the timber used in the Bulldog handles comes from independently audited, sustainable forests making these products an environmentally positive choice.

Bulldog also manufacture in Wigan, England which means that their garden tools travel just a fraction of the 5,000 miles that Chinese tools travel to stock garden centres and diy stores. As the price of fuel continues to increase it cannot make sense to transport tools for thousands of miles across oceans to reach our shores. The Wigan factory is also undergoing environmental changes as they try to reduce noise pollution, use the heat from the forges to warm offices and warehousing and improve insulation around the 4 acre site.

Bulldog Tools can be found throughout the www.qualitygardentools.com website.

Any comments? Please email us at info@qualitygardentools.com

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