Sustainability underpins everything we do
How does sustainability play a role in your business?
The key values of Pippin & Gile are sustainability, connection and community.
So, sustainability is at the core of my business. Our courses strive to be as environmentally sustainable as practicable. We tread lightly on the Earth. We carefully selected our woodland location to be easily reached from London by public transport. We are proud to be on the Avenue Verte an international bike route from London to Paris and have secure bike storage at our site.
We know you don’t need to travel vast distances to learn globally adaptable, meaningful wilderness skills, nor pay vast sums for quality teaching from true professionals of their craft.
We work hard to keep group sizes small and prices affordable, investing each year into a hardship fund whilst maintaining incredibly high standards.
We don’t just aim for minimal environmental impact, but a positive one. We know that after each of our courses, you’ll never walk through the woods in the same way again. We believe knowledge leads to understanding, which leads to valuing diverse and wilder spaces, creating champions for biodiversity and environmental care.
We strive to ensure that our courses produce minimal waste and recycle as much as possible. Often on a foraging course for 16 people, only a milk bottle tab, butter wrapper and stock cube packet go to landfill. The rest of the minimal waste is recycled. Our meat is predominantly the byproduct of pest-control operations when this isn’t suitable we source it locally.
To minimise our direct impact we leave vast swathes of our 10-acre woods to wildlife, only accessing a small portion of it on a regular basis.
At Pippin & Gile we don’t just teach bushcraft and wilderness living, we live it.
Have you had any external recognition for this?
Yes, the Green Growth Awards 2026 recognised Pippin & Gile as one of the top 100 green small businesses in the UK. You can read more about this here.
And more locally at the Tandridge Business Awards 2025 we were one of three finalists in the sustainability category. Â
