When you place an order with us, we see it as an opportunity to show you what we care so much about. Whether that’s in store or online. That doesn’t just mean that we love providing you with the best equipment or sharing our passion for watersports. Sustainability is key to our family life and we put it at the heart of our business decisions, too.
In the last two years a lot more of the business has been happening online, which means more shipping and packing and all that comes with it.
When faced with more online orders we sat down to see how we could pack and ship orders in the most sustainable way. So we decided to use only cardboard boxes or compostable mailing bags, recyclable paper tape, no plastic filling materials unless we are reusing something that was shipped to us or when it’s absolutely necessary to protect an item in shipping.
We just couldn’t see ourselves using polyethylene envelopes! A lot of products already come wrapped in plastic, which protects them, and while there are many companies changing from oil-based plastic packaging for their products to more sustainable options, they are not yet as widely used as we would like.
We don’t claim to be perfect, but we aim to cut out as much plastic as possible in our own processes so we don’t add to the problem.
We reuse wrapping materials and boxes from our suppliers frequently and we hope you reuse the boxes you get from us, too! So if you get a box that doesn’t look 100% perfect, then it’s probably not on it’s first journey and already has a story to tell.
All our boxes can then be either placed in your home recycling or if you have a garden can be shredded/ripped up and added to your compost bin as some of the brown/carbon element of your compost mix. We also use our waste cardboard to mulch around productive trees or to create new growing areas in our garden. Look out for a future blog post on how we turned an O’Neill wetsuit delivery (well the boxes anyway) into a veggie garden.