Earth Day is on Friday 22 April.  This is an annual event first held in 1970 where people across the world show their support for environmental protection.

The Ethical Gift Box team was glad to hear that the theme for 2022 is ‘Invest in our Planet', emphasising the relationship between business and climate change.

While the global focus must rightly start with ensuring large corporations achieve sustainable business practice, we believe every one of us has a role to play in turning back the clock on climate change.

One of our key approaches at the Ethical Gift Box is to support suppliers who strive to put more back into the world than they take out. We know gift giving is part of our society’s language of love, and we encourage people to show their appreciation for others in ways that respect and replenish the earth rather than drain its resources.

Whether you’re giving an Ethical Gift Box as an individual, or ordering many gifts as a corporate thank-you, we want to make it easy for you to buy more intentionally and give more beautifully.

Meet our Climate Heroes Hamper

Today we unpack our Climate Heroes Hamper for you – in which we’ve carefully sourced every treat for their suppliers’ forward-thinking approach to tackling climate change.

First of all, this luxurious hamper is no ordinary basket or throwaway box. It’s a beautiful handwoven, fairly traded African basket, 40cm in diameter. So, after your recipient has enjoyed all the climate-saving treats inside, they can reuse it for storage or holding keepsakes.

Within the handwoven hamper they will find a selection of delicious drinkable and edible treats, perfect for sharing. Or enjoying alone (we wouldn’t blame them!).

 

1. Tanzania Organic Kilimanjaro Cloud Forest Coffee by Source Climate Change: Strength 5 (227g)

Delight the palate with this full-bodied and beautifully balanced coffee from Tanzania. The fresh, delicate dried fruit flavour is balanced with cocoa nib and molasses, and just a hint of pepper.

Sourced from coffee farmers on the slopes of Kilimanjaro, this single origin is located right below the rainforest and helps protect a nature reserve. This Tanzanian coffee exhibits a bright and vibrant acidity, which is then rounded with the deep rich taste of Source Climate Change’s Kaderes coffee from Karagwe.

It is here that the company uses coffee and carbon offsets from the Emiti Nibwo Bulora ‘Trees Sustain Life’ project run by VI-Agroforestry. This project helps small-scale farmers engage in tree planting and develop agroforestry to diversify crops, fix nitrogen to the ground and ensure organic sustainable land management techniques.

 

2. Seasonal Blend Medium Roast Coffee by Bird & Wild: Strength 3 (200g)

This bird-friendly coffee is certified Fairtrade and 100 per cent organic Arabica. It is smooth with dark chocolate tones, balanced acidity and bright floral aromas.

Winner of the Global Impact Award, Bird & Wild helps to protect migrating birds while producing great tasting coffee - the company donates 6 per cent of its sales to the RSPB to help give nature a home.

Bird & Wild only roasts seasonal coffee certified as bird friendly and shade-grown by the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Centre and contributes to support its research and conservation programmes.

All of Bird & Wild’s coffee is certified organic, which means managing a healthy soil base and applying no harmful pesticides to the coffee that could otherwise run off into streams and rivers. This helps reduce billions of pounds of noxious chemicals injected annually into natural ecosystems that support wildlife, communities and climate.

 

3. Apple and Superberry Cold-Pressed Juice by Flawsome! (250ml)

Imperfect apples and tiny chokeberries are transformed into this cold-pressed, healthy and refreshing natural juice drink. A certified B Corp™ business, Flawsome! is carbon positive, offsetting more emissions than it generates.

Being a B Corp™ business means balancing purpose and profit. The certification measures a company’s entire social and environmental performance. Flawsome! Invests 2 per cent of its sales - not just profit - to Felix Project and Fair Share.

Flawsome! also invests in the protection of tropical rainforest, the instalment of wind farms and providing access to carbon-friendly cookstoves to people in the global south.

 

 4. Craft Lager and Pale Ale by Toast (330ml)

Your lucky recipient can enjoy not one but two cans of planet-saving beer from Toast - a lager and a pale ale. The beers are brewed with surplus fresh bread and all Toast profits go to charities to fund systemic change to fix the food system.

Food production is the biggest contributor to climate change, so it’s shocking to think that one third of all food is wasted. Toast’s mission is to change that. By using surplus bread to replace barley, less land, water and energy is used, and carbon emissions are avoided.

The craft lager is crisp and refreshing, brewed with surplus fresh bread and European hops.

The pale ale is smooth, well balanced, golden and zesty. It is brewed with surplus fresh bread, malted barley and British hops.

 

 5. Boar's Back Vintage Cider by Big Nose & Beardy (330ml)

This award-winning real Sussex cider is made from donated and discarded apples from commercial growers and pressed with enthusiasm - making it even more satisfying. Every step of Big Nose & Beardy’s cider making process - from picking, to pressing to packing - tries to support sustainability.

Boar’s Back is 6.3 per cent ABV medium sweet, real cider. It is made from an extremely drinkable mix of Cox and Bramley apples topped off with Dabinet. Crisp acidity gives way to sweetness and a mellow tannin finish.

Pressing the apples uses a combination of solar, water and human power. Big Nose & Beardy uses solar panels to drive the mill and kettles for heating water for washing. Its hydra press uses mains water pressure to squeeze out the juice. All its other processes are manual and take place at the cidery, with the team all living within a few miles, reducing environmental impact.

 

6. Sapling Vodka (50ml)

Climate positive and delicious Sapling is a vodka with a difference! For every bottle sold, a tree is planted. On each bottle a unique code tells you what tree was planted where and a little about the planting project. From fruit trees in London to hazelnut trees in Suffolk, it’s the local communities who benefit from these planting projects.

One tree can absorb up to 1.5 tonnes of carbon in its lifetime. Making a bottle of vodka emits about 2.5kg of carbon, so effectively each bottle of Sapling pays back over 535 times.

Sapling vodka is distilled exclusively from British wheat. It is distilled four times, resulting in a very clean, crisp, and naturally sweet taste. The purity brings out herbaceous and citrusy notes which lends itself beautifully to vodka tonics, vodka lime sodas, or on the rocks!

 

7. Salami Chips by Made for Drink (18g)

These sliced traditional Hungarian salami chips are slow-roasted over beechwood. Inspired by the food and drink of Eastern Europe, they have an intense, smoky, sweet, salty flavour with amazing texture and a touch of acidity.

Made For Drink aims to be a net carbon neutral business by 2030. As a means of taking responsibility for its sustainability goals, it founded the Exmoor Carbon Project. Being net neutral means that all aspects of the business' CO₂ emissions are reduced to zero and where that isn't possible they are offset against genuine Carbon Credit schemes.

The reason it might take so long to achieve net carbon neutral status is that some areas of Made For Drink’s supply chain are further out of its control than others. In the meantime, this premium bar snacks company is proudly 100 per cent carbon neutral and working towards being plastic free. All of its product packaging is home compostable.

 

 8. Lightly Salted Popcorn by Proper (20g)

Delicious hand-popped corn, sprinkled with a little sea salt. This popcorn is vegan, gluten-free and made using all-natural seasonings. Proper was the first snack brand in the UK to be certified B Corp™ and is on a mission to get its carbon footprint to zero by 2030.

It is training its team to be carbon literate as part of this mission - the first known food company in the world to do this.

Proper popcorn is also Fairtrade and contains no palm oil, making it better for the planet as the palm oil industry has been a disaster for the world’s forests, wildlife and climate.

 

9. Sweet Sriracha Chilli Seaweed Chips by Shore (25g)

These naturally delicious crunchy seaweed and supergrain chips are flavoured with lip-smackingly tangy chilli seasoning.

Shore is working to make seaweed a sustainable plant-based food of the future, one that is naturally nutritious, tasty and above all, kind on the planet.

Since 2016 it has been growing, harvesting and processing premium Scottish seaweed to create products that are 100 per cent sustainable, good for the coastal environment and beneficial for local Scottish rural communities.

 

10. Goji and Zesty Orange 70% Dark Chocolate Bar by Doisy & Dam (80g)

This Colombian dark chocolate contains chewy goji berries and zesty orange. Made by B Corp™ chocolate company Doisy & Dam, this chocolate bar is palm oil free, ethically sourced, made from natural ingredients and Vegan Society certified.

Doisy & Dam is committed to paying cocoa farmers fairly and making chocolate filled with better ingredients.

It’s not just its all-natural, properly sourced ingredients that make Doisy & Dam chocolate delicious. Knowing it is good for the people that make it and good for the planet makes it even more satisfying to eat.

 

11. Maldon Sea Salt Dark Chocolate Bar by Love Cocoa (20g)

The deep, luxurious flavours of this Peruvian 70 per cent cacao chocolate are brought out by the crunchy, hand-harvested sea salt flakes combined in the bar.

British artisan producer Love Cocoa believes that good sea salt doesn’t need to come all the way from the Himalayas, so it saves thousands of unnecessary miles, and supports the environment by sourcing it from the UK.

This dreamy single-origin dark chocolate is also free from palm oil, vegan friendly, slave free and comes in plastic free packaging (with a compostable wood inner film), making it extremely climate positive.

For every bar sold, Love Cocoa gives back to the planet by planting a tree in cacao plantations in Cameroon.

And there’s more!

We donate £1 from the sale of each hamper on your behalf to your choice of one of the four initiatives that we support:

• Anti Slavery
• Survival International
• The Ocean Clean Up
• Ecologi

The Ocean Clean Up is a non-profit organisation developing advanced technologies to rid the oceans of plastic. Ecologi supports international tree planting projects to compensate for environmental impact.

To wrap it all up, the hamper (like all our African hampers) is encased in compostable film and sent out in a protective recycled box. A beautiful gift for Earth Day or any day!

If you’d like to find ways to take action to #InvestInOurPlanet (other than sourcing your gifts from us!) you could visit the Earth Day website. Change starts with action - big or small - so join the movement to change the world this Earth Day.