It's world clean up day today – 20th September. Which is a good time to remind us to keep exploring ways to help our planet.
About the home, we compost all our food waste to our compost piles, and add our grass cuttings to that, the rest we fill the organic bins to be collected. We recycle all our plastics and small cardboard boxes. Large cardboard boxes get cut down so we can use as packing material when posting off your orders. Any bubble wrap that comes into the house, we have to fight it off the cat who loves popping the bubbles (strange cat), and we then cut it down and roll it up ready to re-use to package your orders. Nothing gets thrown away – everything gets re-used.
Our lip-balm containers are compostable according to the website we brought them from, but we haven’t tested it ourselves. Any plastic bags we use can be recycled in the soft plastics recycling stations at supermarkets. The aluminium tins can also be recycled or repurposed for other uses. Our glass bottles are re-useable and re-cyclable but the pumps are the only thing which aren’t which is a shame but we are always exploring alternative options. Most of our labels are paper, and we have recently changed our vinyl labels on our Kawakawa Body Oil to something that will break down.
We would love to be able to use cardboard containers for our lipbalms/balms, but with the amount of oil we use, this is out of the question as the oil would leach into the cardboard and would end up being very messy. We continue to scan new packaging to see if they are suitable for our products.
We don’t put our products in fancy cardboard boxed packaging. Our reason for this is twofold. It may look nice, but it’s adds to your cost (and ours), and it’s just another 'thing' that gets thrown away, so why do it? This also keeps our prices competitive.
I’m sure there’s much more we could be doing and we're always concerned that our plastics aren’t being recycled like the councils say they are, and are instead going in our landfills. All plastic in landfill eventually make their way into our oceans and add to the pollution there. One last thing that concerns me is that there are not enough businesses getting rid of the use of plastic packaging, we still see so much unnecessary plastic wrapping at the supermarkets and I’d like to see this practice stopped.
What things are you doing to keep your footprint low?