Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

We follow reduce, reuse, recycle where possible. From small changes like using glass milk bottles instead of plastic, using recycled printer paper, and recycling ink cartridges, to much larger decisions including assessing the complete life cycle of many of our garments.

Some of our current initiatives include:

• Having replacement ties for our cotton aprons, as we know sometimes the aprons outlive the ties. We have added a buttonhole to the design to make it easy to tie them into place and reduces the need for discarding the full apron.
• When we can’t re-use the boxes that our deliveries come in, the cardboard is bailed and compacted then recycled. Our warehouse use paper tape to seal the boxes, making the recycling simpler.
• All the polythene is collected and recycled regularly. We are reviewing the use of polyethene trying to eliminate double bagging where we can, without the detriment to our pristine white jackets.

We are constantly looking at our stock with a mind to altering, updating, tailoring our styles to ensure we always stay up-to-date. If an item isn’t selling, we don’t discard, we re-invent.

This means that in our clothing life cycle, we are able to offer our surplus heavyweight clothing and footwear to charities to provide warmth and appropriate clothing for the homeless, or to allow charities close to our hearts to reuse these items where possible. Retail and or more fashionable items/suiting are made available to staff and charities before recycling. Anything which cannot be re-used in this way have been sent to recycle into power.

Carbon Reduction 2022

We are always looking to try and reduce our impact on the environment, whether that’s by using recycled plastic in our polyester aprons, or by using sustainably sourced cotton for our chef jackets.

In 2021 we conducted a review of our carbon emissions to see how and where we could reduce them, and further reduce our impact on the environment.

Scope 1

The first, and simplest step on our carbon reduction plan was to ensure all company vehicles were fully electric. This step was completed quite quickly with all company vehicles now fully electric, including our van which is used to transport goods between our Leatherhead warehouse to our London store.

Scope 2

The second step involves trying to reduce the carbon emissions from the energy sources we use to power our buildings by at least 50%. This includes ensuring that the electricity we use to charge the vehicles come from renewable sources, and checking which energy suppliers are using the most renewable energy producing sources compared to our current ones and switching over to them. Our target is to move to renewable sources of electricity at all locations by 2023.

Scope 3

Our final step on our 2022 plan is to encourage our suppliers to use more sustainably sourced products in our garments. This will also be a requirement for any future suppliers, in order for them to be chosen as a product supplier they will have to show that a large percentage of their materials come from approved sustainable sources. This also feeds into our packaging requirements; we want to make sure that we increase the recycled content in our packaging by at least 50%. Currently the majority of our cardboard packaging comes from recycled material which can then be recycled again. We are also looking into various plastics to see whether they can either breakdown naturally or can be recycled and reused, this does not include our carrier bags which are already made of 100% recycled material.

Finally, we want to encourage our 3rd party logistics companies to increase their own sustainability, whether this is by encouraging them to use alternative fuels in their vehicles (such as biodiesel) or even switching to electric vehicles where appropriate. We want to make sure we are doing the best we can to reduce our impact on the world.

This will not be a quick and easy thing to do, however we want to show that we are doing our part to help reduce the effects of global warming by reducing our carbon footprint as best we can and hopefully encourage others to do the same.