Raw ingredients come in and finished products are shipped out. How do we, at the schmoo work towards being as environmentally friendly as possible.
Well the statement ‘as environmentally as possible’ opens a rabbit hole of its own, because if all things were equal we would send many products out to you, naked’. now on one hand that would be great…. no packaging. Job done?
however... Goods must be labelled. Liquids need contained. delicate and breakable items need protecting from the rigors of being put through the whole shipping process.
there is no escaping the need for packaging materials.
We can go down the biodegradable, vegetable plastic route which is fabulous….. however these items at the moment remain costly and have a limited shelf life, especially if they are in your humid bathroom at home. the extra packaging costs that we would incur would have to be passed on to you, via price rises, not something we want to do. again, choosing this route would’nt solve the problem of how we would dispose of the packaging the raw materials arrive in. there had to be a compromise.
our solution… always open to change, progress and suggestion is to sort all the packaging that we receive into types. Paper, card, peanuts and bubblewrap etc. we store both the recyclable and non recyclable together. thankfully, most suppliers use biodegradeable packaging, but like us, if a supplier receives non recyclable material with their items they try to reuse it to avoid putting it into a landfil. When we package items we wrap and pack using these recycled and recyclable materials. In the box we ship out we now include a little note saying that we recycle and reuse our packaging material. we hope that you recycle and reuse the packing materials you receive your purchases in and recycle them forward as well.
On a side note, i have gift bags and tissue paper almost as old as the children, that have been recycled around family members so many times that it has become part of the routine of celebrations to see who receives what gift bag ‘ again’. . Last christmas i changed from wrapping everything in brown parcel paper and colourful string to brightly patterned re-useable material. I purchased several meters of colourful fabric and wrapped everything in fabric held together with string.
now back to the topic at hand… boxes and tape
recycled Cardboard boxes are often used as outer shipping boxes on the products we send out and any excess is taken to the compost heap where the worms go to work on it and turn it into compost for our garden.
packing tape is soon to be replaced with gummed paper. it is a greener alternative and we think it looks much nicer on the boxes.
the products themselves – how recyclable are they?
all our bottles and containers are recyclable. they have the recycling triangle on the base which identifies how and where they can be recycled.
the reed diffuser bottles are glass and can be recycled in regular glass recycling bins.
wax melts are sold in cellophane packaging. cellophane is biodegradeable but it does take several years to do so.
our bathbombs and soaps are wrapped in a biodegradeable shrink wrap.
the lip balms are packaged in HDPE tubes and tin pots. Both these are recyclable.
room sprays are packaged in PET bottles.
whipped soap / sugar & salt scrubs are packaged in PET jars. we have considered glass jars but are concerned that these could slip out of wet hands in a bathroom and smash.
waxed cardboard tubes are currently being trialed as a replacement for the lip balm tubes and for our ‘works in progress’. we are looking at tins for our ‘gift box’ style shampoo bars although regular shampoo bars will be biofilm wrapped. We are always open to other suggestions. please feel free to leave a message in the box below.