Saying no to plastic – We are going greener!

The ‘war on plastic’ is one of the most talked about environmental issues. It is found everywhere. As a business we have a duty to do our bit to tackle this issue. We try to minimise our plastic use in every step.  

Westmorland Sheepskins have always looked at ways to reduce our waste and also push our suppliers to do the same. Our own brand slippers now come in cotton bags. We say now but we’ve done this for the past 3 years or so! The cotton bags are great little keep sakes, we encourage them to be reused and reused and reused – we’d love to see how you use yours.   

Brown paper bags – we don’t give out plastic bags. We give customers who need a bag a paper bag which is made using recycled paper and is widely recycled too.

If you order online with us, we swapped plastic postage bags to paper bags a being hugely more environmentally friendly.   

The design of the bag was created by the very Talented Ellie Mae, we have been working with Ellie for a few years now. She went to Leeds Art College and not only do we love that we could keep it local but we love her fun Yorkshire vibe / illustrations and thick Barnsley accent!   

If you have ordered household items from us you may have noticed a ‘reduce and reuse’ stamp on the box. The box may not be in perfect condition but that is because we have reused it. All other new cardboard boxes are made out of recycled cardboard too and the tape used is paper based and widely recycled.   

On a slightly different note..

The fixtures and fittings we have in the shop are made from wood, metal or glass. Many of which are repurposed from other shops when they’ve had a refit. Bonus!

Our warehouse racking is either second hand or hand made from old pallets, we store everything directly onto shelves or in cardboard boxes, not plastic ones. We then recycle any boxes that we can’t reuse.  

We know we are not perfect but as the saying goes – we don’t need a handful of people doing zero waste perfectly. We need millions of people doing it imperfectly.  We know this is a work in progress. We will commit to making changes where we can in order to reduce our impact to a minimum.