SAP UK has announced it has added social enterprises Hey Girls and Serious Tissues to its growing roster of purpose-led service providers, with their sustainable sanitary and toiletry products being implemented across most SAP UK offices in support of our 5&5 by ’25 initiative.
Hey Girls is a sustainable buy one, donate one, social enterprise with an aim to empower women, improve period dignity in the workplace and to end period poverty in the UK. To help support those who experience periods, SAP is providing sanitary products for those days where you may get caught short, while also taking the opportunity to partner with a social enterprise that helps fight period poverty.
All Hey Girls products purchased by SAP are 100% plastic free and for every box SAP buys, anyone in the UK who can’t afford sanitary products, deemed ‘luxury’, will receive a free box. The plant-based products are made using responsibly sourced and sustainable materials and are chemical free.
Celia Hodson, founder and CEO of Hey Girls, said: “All of us at Hey Girls are thrilled to partner with a company on the scale of SAP, who have a proven track record of social responsibility. It is never acceptable for people in today’s age to have restricted access to period products and we praise SAP for the fantastic work it is doing to not just help improve the period dignity of its employees, but also the wider community and those living in period poverty.”
We are also pleased to introduce Serious Tissues throughout most of our UK offices, which is the UK’s first carbon neutral toilet paper. With a staggering 10 million trees cut down every year just to make toilet roll. Serious Tissues addresses this by planting a tree for every toilet roll it sells, which equates to five Hyde Parks a week – that’s 20,000 trees! All its products are made in the UK and there is no plastic in its packaging.
Serious Tissues also aims to tackle poverty by hiring from the local communities where it plants its trees, including the UK, Nepal, Indonesia, Madagascar, Mozambique, Kenya, Ethiopia, Haiti, Colombia & Central America. It remains respectful to the surrounding cultures by planting trees indigenous to those areas.
Co-Founder of Serious Tissues Chris Baker says: “We are delighted to be working with SAP to fight both the environmental and social effects of climate change. It’s incredible that just by changing your toilet roll, together we’ll be planting thousands of trees to capture carbon and reverse deforestation.”
Implementing Hey Girls and Serious Tissues shines a light on SAPs procurement with purpose drive across the globe – as part of our mission to help the world run better and improve people’s lives. These products directly impact our colleagues in the best way possible, as well as directly impacting local communities across the world living in poverty. SAP believes in the power of social enterprises and the meaningful work we can collectively do together to improve people’s lives and make the world more sustainable.
Since 2019, SAP has procured 32 social enterprises in the UK, and this latest partnership represents a particularly monumental move for SAP. Following the introduction of the Free Period Products Provision Bill in Scotland, SAP becomes one of very few companies across the UK providing free sanitary products to our colleagues. From a sustainability standpoint, SAP is setting crucial standards that our partner ecosystem and customers can reflect and hopefully act upon.
Find out more about Hey Girls and Serious Tissues and you can watch more about Serious Tissues here.
