Bee is for Biodiversity

At Ardagh, we believe in the importance of giving back to the communities in which we operate. To date, our programmes have focused on education, recycling, health and volunteering. We also pay particular attention to the world around us and in particular, the rich and abundant wildlife, which has inherited or created natural habitats close to our facilities. We are therefore proud to support the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity and their 15^th Sustainable Development Goal – Life on Land.

To mark this and to celebrate World Bee Day today (May 20) we’re proud to announce that three of our glass teams in Germany, have collaborated to create a biodiversity initiative for one of nature’s smallest but most vital creatures – the bee. To protect and conserve these vital pollinators, key to the reproduction of our food and drink crops, our production teams, have installed beehives across three Ardagh locations in Germany. Our aim is to nurture the bee population and the health of the local ecosystem by installing beehives containing up to 100,000 bees. We hope to expand this programme across our other locations in the future.

Did you know, a single bee can pollinate up to 4,000 flowers a day and fly up to 30 km per hour? To fill an average jar of honey (500g), a bee will fly on average 120,000 km, that’s three times around the world. At harvest time, we look forward to packaging our honey in infinitely sustainable glass jars and ensuring this wonderful combination of pure honey in glass jars is donated to good causes.

By installing beehives on our sites, we are helping the bees to thrive in a protected environment, so they can pollinate plants, and consequently increase biodiversity in the areas they pollinate. This simple action of installing the hives will contribute to improving the environmental ecosystems in Ardagh neigbourhoods. We’re excited to watch our busy bees in action.