Over the past few months, I’ve been looking at ways to reduce our plastic packaging and our use of single use plastic. Up until now, our products are packaged with a card insert inside a small cellophane bag or resealable plastic bag (both of these are single use plastic). Orders then go into a jiffy type bag.
Not ideal by any means in terms of plastic.
With many of our products, it’s not practical to send them out in the mail loose, as they will either get damaged or lost. Most of you probably know I love a challenge and this is one of the biggest challenges facing any retail company. Changing packaging can be a costly exercise however, by keeping costs down, this first step towards new packaging, seems to have answered it’s brief.
Step 1 – Packaging the product
After a trial club last year where the packaging used was recyclable paper, a suitable paper alternative is now available for most products that we sell. Each paper package has been designed and made by me, by hand, and the plan now is to trial these with as many different products as we can to see how they work out. All our paper packages, like those below, are recyclable. These paper packages are designed to hold one product and plans are underway to further the range to enable multiple products per package.
For as many non-wholesale customers as possible, we will endeavour to send out our products in the new paper packaging. At the moment, wholesale packaging will remain unchanged, as this is a very different type of challenge.
This is just the first step along this road, and there will be further changes being made to our packaging over the coming weeks. The next step will be to deal with the jiffy type mailers to see how we can reduce use there and still get our products to the customer in the same condition they left us.
Atomic Knitting Blog 
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