Our Recyclable Packaging + Waste Management
Let's get down to the nitty gritty of fashion retail! It's incredibly common to find that all clothing items you buy in fashion stores are at some point individually wrapped in soft plastics. Clothes are taken out of these packages for display in stores. But the waste is out the back, building up.
This is a snapshot of our stockroom after pressuring our manufacturers to stop sending clothes individually wrapped in plastic. As you can see, we’ve nearly phased out plastic-wrapped stock, and since early 2018, have requested our brands send us stock free of plastic.
In 2018 we began using (and re-using) cardboard envelopes for protecting stock, and storing them in second-hand filing cabinets.
The amount of plastic used in clothing retail is unnecessary, and we are proud of our stance to refuse all plastic on behalf of our customers and our retailers.
Many of our brands have been enthusiastically on board with our decision, and we are continuing to push for further change.
Here's a delivery of lovely Moromini clothing, carefully packaged in paper bag layers from the super manufacturing team in India.
When we send out your orders, we carefully wrap them in brown paper bags
We use brown paper tape (recyclable) to seal your parcels, and leave them out for our cool courier person to collect.
When you get your orders, the paper packaging can be easily reused if it's still sturdy enough, or used to light the fire, line a litter box, put in your home compost, or put in the recycling!
A lovely thing we've noticed is the creative recycled packaging we see being used when items are returned to us for exchange. Check out this nifty situation! A pair of shorts were sent back in exchange for a larger size, and we received them wrapped in a reused compostable bag, inside a reused paper pottle! So cool.
We've just found a recycling collection for the printing backs of our courier labels. They're a plastic coated paper, and we've had to send them to landfill up until now.
Any soft plastics we still receive from brands are now going into the widely available soft plastics recycling programme. Hard plastics (like the plastic strapping on big courier boxes) go to the Tiny Plastics Factory here in Wellington. Cardboard and paper waste go into the Wellington City paper recycling. The occasional compostable bag that comes our way gets taken and put into one of our staff's home compost bins. Any rubbish or packaging we can't find a home for goes to landfill.
So in terms of waste output from Hoopla Kids, we are down to minimal landfill waste. We are pleased with this!
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