​ The new Wares Cares logo

Our regular customers and friends will know that we’ve long been passionate about the environment and about the small changes that we can all make in our lives to reduce our own impact on the environment. From single-use plastics and ocean pollution to zero-waste initiatives, we’ve been championing an eco-friendly approach for quite some time. We’ve recently put in place a more formal approach to our own internal processes and we’d like to share what we’ve been up to with you in today’s blog post.

Biodegradeable and compostable - Wares Cares

We’ve been blogging regularly about issues like plastic pollution and showcasing zero-waste stores that can help us all to reduce the amount of plastic we get through in our daily lives. Of course, our extensive ranges of glass bottles and jars have helped many people switch to a zero-waste approach to shopping already as they make storage at home so easy. However, we are committed to making similar environmentally-friendly changes to our own business processes too, and you’ll start to see evidence of this throughout our website, via the ‘Wares Cares’ logo. This logo will indicate where we have made changes to our products and packaging to minimise our environmental impact.

While many of our products already have excellent environmental credentials, since glass is endlessly reusable and recyclable, we have still identified areas where we can improve on things. Take our jam jar lids for example. These will now be despatched to customers in compostable bags. Once you’ve unpacked your order, you can add the bag to your compost heap, where it will break down and contribute to providing you with some wonderful compost to grow future crops in, in your vegetable garden. If you aren’t able to compost at home, you can add these bags to your food waste bin, if your local authority offers a food waste collection. And if not, they can go in your regular waste, but you still have the knowledge that they will not contribute to landfill problems, since they will rapidly, and harmlessly, break down wherever they end up.

Why is it important to focus on biodegradeable and compostable items?

It would have been easy to look at our product range and say that we were doing plenty already in terms of the environment, since the bulk of the items we sell are made of glass, and are therefore easy to reuse and easy to recycle. After all, there are bottle banks in every town and city throughout the UK and we can all make batch after batch of jams, jellies and preserves using the same glass jars. With the environment in such crisis though, it’s up to all of us to continually question what more we can do to minimise our impact, including businesses like ours.

Packaging has long been a thorny issue for many companies, as there is no getting away from it as an essential part of any online retail business. Without good packaging, products would arrive damaged and unusable. In recent times, great leaps have been made in making packaging that is much more environmentally-friendly and there is now sufficient choice, at a cost-effective price, to make switching to biodegradeable and compostable packaging materials a viable option for all retailers.

We recognised that now was the right time to revisit our packaging, along with other aspects of our business, and make changes that will stand us in good stead for the coming years as we continue to strive for sustainable and ethically responsible ways to do business.

Ways you can help us to reduce our impact

If you order from Wares, please consider reusing any packaging if possible to get the most value from it before it goes to be recycled. If any of the packaging we send out is compostable, it makes sense to add it to your compost heap, reducing the amount of materials that require processing by your local authority.

Another idea for reducing the impact of your online shopping include making fewer, but larger orders. Could you get together with friends, or fellow WI members, for example, to order a pallet delivery of jam jars, rather than a dozen or so at a time? Could you add some gift items to your own order so that you have items ready to give to friends and family without having to place an additional order? With a little planning ahead, it’s possible to get more from every online shopping experience, reducing delivery miles and therefore emissions.

As can be seen, it is really beneficial to sit back and take stock from time to time to work out how each one of us can make a real contribution to reducing our environmental impact. The steps we take might seem small, but add them all together and something really significant can happen. Hopefully, our Wares Cares logo, and the actions behind it, will inspire us and you to keep on asking what we can do to become more environmentally responsible. Why not join us on this journey?