Sustainability

Most retail sustainability pages are written to make you feel better about the purchase. This one is written to say which of our products are genuinely better for the environment than the thing they replace, and which are not, so you can decide.

The part that is genuinely better

• Wood pellet cat litter. Compressed sawmill offcuts — a by-product of timber that already exists, rather than a mineral dug out of the ground. It breaks down into sawdust when wet and composts. Against clay-based clumping litter, which is strip-mined and reaches landfill essentially unchanged, it is not a close contest.
• Plant-based wipes. The plant-fibre wipes break down in a home compost bin. The plastic-fibre ones do not, which is why we label which is which on the listing rather than in the small print.
• Concentrates and refills. A 5 litre concentrate replaces a lot of trigger sprays, and most of what you stop buying is water and packaging.

Bulk is the quiet one

The biggest thing we do is also the least interesting to write about: selling the large size. A 15 kg sack is less packaging per use than five 3 kg bags, and one delivery instead of five. Most of the environmental cost of household consumables is packaging and transport, and buying less often moves both.

It is also why we will not sell a “value” size that costs more per litre than the one beside it. If the bigger unit is not better on price as well as packaging, nobody buys it and nothing improves.

The part that is not

Bleach is bleach. Caustic soda is a strong alkali however it is packaged. Solvent-based paint is solvent-based paint. We sell these because they work and because the jobs they do still need doing, and we are not going to describe them as environmentally friendly. What we will do is tell you what is in them, sell them in a size that means fewer containers, and put the safety data sheet where you can read it.

Packaging

We ship in cardboard with paper void fill, and we reuse sound inbound boxes for outbound orders — so an order may arrive in a box with somebody else's label crossed out on it. That is deliberate, not sloppiness. Where a product reaches us from the manufacturer in plastic it goes out in that plastic; repacking it into something greener would mean throwing the original away.

What we are not claiming

We hold no carbon-neutral certification, run no offsetting scheme and have no environmental accreditation, and we would rather say so than imply one with a logo. We have not measured our emissions, so we are not going to publish a figure for them. If that changes, this page changes, and it will say who verified it.

If you think something here is wrong, or you know a better alternative to a line we stock, tell us. That is genuinely how half the catalogue got chosen.