Now more than ever, it is important for businesses and individuals alike to consider their impact on the environment. At Gilt Edged, although it is an ongoing journey we have been making some changes to our operations to ensure we are being more eco-friendly and moving towards a sustainable business. Some things we have been doing for a long time, but we have never officially announced so we thought what better time than now?
Packaging
Back in 2019 we removed individual plastic bagging from clothing garments. Following on from this, we now reuse boxes and other packaging that comes into the building – so don’t be surprised if your order doesn’t come in a shiny new Gilt Edged branded box! While we used to send out all our orders in branded cardboard boxes, we believe this is unnecessary – you know your order has come from us, right? Instead, we are making use of boxes that come into the building and reusing these for your orders. Excess packaging materials are reused in our Consumer Sales department, to help protect fragile products. Our tech gift partners at USB2U have made changes to their packaging too, ensuring these products arrive with customers in an eco-friendly manner. We are also encouraging our suppliers wherever possible to reduce any unnecessary packaging, especially plastic bags.
Our product range
We have worked hard over the last year or two to significantly expand our offering of eco-friendly and sustainable promotional products and clothing. On our website you will now find dedicated areas to eco-friendly gifts and sustainable products. When you get a quote from us, we will provide a sustainable alternative wherever possible to encourage you to think of the planet when ordering your promo products. We are continuing to work on this as new products become available. We want to help businesses and organisations become more environmentally friendly in their marketing efforts!
Our diaries
For a long while now, some of our diary products have used FSC paper. Our production partners are FSC accredited, meaning the paper used is from sustainable forests. While this is currently not able to apply to diaries that are finished in-house, this is something we are looking into for the future. This year, diaries for individual customers on our retail site have changed to being wire bound from the plastic combs. This is to reduce our plastic use, and we will be rolling this out across the board in the next year or two – for both corporate and retail customers. Both sets of customers have over the years requested less plastic and packaging in our products so we are pleased to accommodate this.
Office waste
At Gilt Edged, we use every opportunity to recycle as much as we can. We have large recycling bins in our factory, and encourage our staff to recycle as much as possible. We are in the process of educating our staff on individual actions they can take to reduce their impact on the environment, such as considering what they bring food to the workplace in, and reducing single use plastic. In 2019 we had an aim to reduce our paper usage and we are pleased to say this has significantly diminished. We no longer use paper files for customers, or print all invoices – these were both huge parts of our paper consumption and we are proud of what we have achieved in this area.
Redundant stock
Due to the nature of our work, over time we accumulate lots of product samples. We have begun looking at how we can put these to use elsewhere and extend their lifecycle, rather than opting for recycling or landfill straight away. We usually hold staff sample sales once a year to aid with this and recoup costs. This year we participated in a car boot sale with old clothing samples, saving many garments from landfill. We also recently took part in the BBC’s Make a Difference campaign to donate old sports kits to children who otherwise would not have access to sports. We are currently looking into options with other samples we have collected over the years, looking to partner with local charities or schools where possible. If you know anywhere that you think could benefit, please let us know!
These are just a few steps on our journey. We are planning to go even further over the next few years and dive deeper into our business operations to see what sustainable changes we can make. We have some ideas but if you have any pointers please get in touch – after all, small steps add up to big change.
