Growing tomatoes while you shower

Are you one of the estimated 40 million Brits who shower daily? Or one of the 8 million who wash just once a week? Are you in the 10% of us who fancy ourselves as superstar shower singers? Perhaps you’re one of the 200,000 Londoners who admit to knocking back a tipple while they wash. Whatever you do (or drink!) it’s likely you’re spending 7 or 8 minutes scrubbing every time.

But have you ever stopped to think what happens to all that water running down the drain? What about the bubbly lukewarm dregs from the washing up? Or the litres and litres that swish out from your dishwasher and washing machine every day? The water’s still hot, still charged with precious energy. Imagine if we could put that heat back to use…

Our greenhouses are doing just that. We’re taking your everyday wastewater to create the very best growing conditions, and the very best food.

Thinking big

And it’s no small task. We have the largest heat pumps in the UK, powering your wasted water straight from treatment plants into a greenhouse one-and-a-half times larger than the O2 Arena. It’s still warm when it gets here, keeping our greenhouses at the perfect growing temperature. We’ve also used more glass than the Shard and five kilometres of pipework to bring a world-first in truly renewable heating to UK agriculture.

Nothing wasted

Once we’ve finished with the water and it’s cool, we channel it back so it can be used again without wasting a drop. Not only that, we’re funnelling the carbon emissions from our own on-site electricity plant back into the greenhouse for our plants to absorb. 

Reducing carbon 

All in all, we’re growing tomatoes with a 60% carbon reduction compared to traditional greenhouses. With agriculture accounting for 9% of all greenhouse gas emissions in the UK, that really adds up. And that’s before we’ve even looked at food-miles. By growing our food on British soil, we’re moving our tomatoes from plant to plate without them ever spending a moment in the air. This removes hundreds of thousands of food-miles from supply chains and a big step-change for low-carbon food for the UK.

So, whether you wash a once-a-day or once-a-week, like singing your lungs out or swigging down a glass of Rosé, let’s put that wasted water back to work.