Environmental Policy
We may be a Small Business but take our Environmental Responsibilities very seriously. Making changes to become more environmentally friendly inevitably increases costs but we have decided that we will not be passing these costs on to our customers. Our profit margins have been significantly squeezed but we feel we owe it to our customers, children and the planet to make the changes and are prepared to take the financial hit.
Location and Buildings
We work from home so energy use is kept to a minimum. We don't rent a large office space so there is no unnecessary heating and lighting consumption.
Working from home we never use our cars to go to work. If we need to travel to appointments we always use public transport. In fact we can only think of one occasion in 11 years when we used a car to get to a meeting and that was because the transport links were so bad. On that occasion we car pooled.
The majority of our meetings with suppliers and freelancers are conducted online.
Our computers are set to sleep after a certain period of inactivity.
Lights are only switched on when rooms are occupied.
We wear jumpers to keep warm rather than turning up the heating 😀
Products
The rubber we use is synthetic so no trees are involved in the production of our stamps.
Our Stamptastic Personalised Name Stamps are acrylic which is a plastic (and recyclable) but it is not single use plastic. The Name Stamps can be used thousands of times and if you decide to change the rubber on the end then the acrylic can be repurposed for another stamp. In fact, the Name Stamps are frequently purchased for elderly relatives in care homes so if you look after your stamp it could last you a lifetime.
Stamptastic Name Stamps for School Uniform are an environmentally friendly alternative to plastic name tags, stickers, fabric sew-in and iron-on labels.
We are already investigating our next order of name stamps being made out of recycled materials and are discussing with our supplier how this can be done without impacting on the transparency of the stamps.
We are looking into offering 10ml refill bottles in biodegradable plastic to extend the lifespan of the inkpads.
We are discontinuing superfluous lines that are not environmentally friendly (such as items that contain non-biodegradable glitter) and are carefully considering environmental impact when making decisions on new lines.
We try as much as possible to use and support small businesses in the UK. If we import any items we carefully consider the environmental impacts. We order months in advance so any goods can be imported to the UK by sea rather than air.
Packaging
As a result of our own frustration with too much unnecessary packaging, we have decided to change the envelopes we use. We previously used bubble envelopes but now use an environmentally friendly envelope that contains no plastic. This comes at a significant extra cost to us as each envelope costs us 7p more. That might not seem much but our margins are very tight and this is an additional squeeze for us.
If our orders (usually large or international) are shipped in boxes and require tape we use environmentally friendly paper tape.
Parcels are dispatched with the minimum required packaging. We no longer use bubble wrap and are constantly looking at environmentally friendly alternatives for protecting items during transit.
When our current batch of stickers for packaging has finished we will be using one of our own customised rubber stamps to put our logo on our packaging.
Paper, card and packaging materials are reused whenever possible and recycled when not. If those material contain data that falls under GDPR then this is shredded & recycled.
We try to minimise the amount of packaging material and promotional literature which is sent out with each order.
The current leaflets that we use are printed by Printed.com. Printed.com is a Forest Stewardship Council® (FSC®) Chain of Custody Certified business. FSC provides a credible link between responsible production and consumption of forest products.
FSC Chain of Custody (CoC) certification ensures that FSC materials and products have been checked at every stage of processing. This means that we can be confident that all Printed.com labelled FSC-certified papers are genuine.
Stamptastic PTA Scheme
We encourage PTAs on our PTA Rewards Scheme to use the tracking code rather than request leaflets.
We send out fundraising vouchers by email instead of printing and posting.
Suppliers
Where possible we use UK suppliers thereby reducing our carbon footprint.
Our UK based fulfilment house has a dedicated recycling skip that has been acquired to enable all card and paper can be recycled.
We ask all suppliers for a copy of their Environmental Policy.
Plant a Tree
In February 2020 we signed up to the Plant A Tree Campaign with The Woodland Trust and have committed to puchase 50 trees a year. So far we have planted 50 trees in 2020, 2021 and 2022.
Our donation has been earmarked for WLT’s Plant a Tree programme which is restoring areas of forest that have been cleared prior to land purchase. Our trees will be planted by Hutan, WLT’s partner in Malaysian Borneo, who are planting 20,000 native trees to reforest an area previously cleared for oil palm plantations. It will ultimately be incorporated into the Keruak Wildlife Corridor which WLT helped fund a few years ago. The corridor provides continuous forest habitat for animals such as Orang-utan and Pygmy Elephants to move safely over greater distances.
Click on the map below to see where we are planting trees.
What We Use!
Smol Laundry Tablets
Smol Dishwasher Tablets
Lush Plastic Free Shampoo
Earth Conscious Plastic Free Deodorant
Milk delivery in glass milk bottles from Milk & More
Holland and Barrett Bamboo Toothbrush
Beeswax Foodwrap from Beeswax Wraps
Soda Stream for Sparkling Water
Instead of single use plastic water bottles we use camelbak bottles.
We use soap not handwash and bought some lovely soap dishes from Small Business, Smells Like Home Store.
What We Do!
Our pre-loved clothes are taken to Charity Shop (via 6 months in the boot of our car) rather than to landfill.
We recycle plastic, paper, card, food and garden waste.
We use pedal power and foot power for the majority of our personal journeys and if we need to use the car we aim to Car Pool where possible.
Some Ethical and Envrionmentally Friendly blogs we like:
We know there is a lot more that we can do but hope you realise from reading our Policy that we are taking Environmental issues seriously and are making changes to our business even though they are more expensive and a cost that we are not passing on to our customers.
Thanks for taking the time to read and for supporting our small business.
Love Emma and Fran 💚💚
