Plastic Free July

It has arrived, in its 10th year, and its an award winner! The campaign started in Australia and has reached all corners of the world, encouraging us to reduce the amount of single use plastic we use. 

So what is it? It's a challenge for us as consumers and as businesses to go plastic free in July. If you check out the campaigns website it has so many ideas of changes and swaps you can make to reduce or stop plastic consumption. 

Why am I talking about plastic free July when I make jewellery and it's made from metal? Good question and don't worry this isn't me telling you how to become plastic free, but rather me being transparent about my business practices. 

Unfortunately Memor Jewellery is not plastic free, you might be wondering how!!?? Let me be clear I do not produce or actively buy plastic. So how am I not plastic free? A lot of things I need to use within the business sometimes come with plastic wrap or in plastic baggies e.g. the eco-silver arrives in a form of plastic!

Frustrating right?! It is the supplier that uses the plastic within their packaging, so is there much I can do? The answer is yes! I do some things already which hopefully reduces the amount of unnecessary plastic, but there are more steps I could take. 

Here are 5 steps that I can do more of to help reduce the amount of plastic that my business is exposed to:

Step One

Talk to my suppliers and let them know how I feel about the use of plastic in their packaging. If they don't know their clients want them to make a change they probably won't and there might be a really good reason as to why they are still using plastic that I just don't know about, yet.

Step Two

Research. Can I change supplier? Is there another supplier that uses no plastic or perhaps less plastic than the one I am using now? Whilst researching this I would also have to analyse other areas of the supplier to make sure other practices align with Memor's ethos. 

Step three

Is there a way I can reduce the amount of plastic I receive? In one way yes and the answer is; being super organised and placing less orders. The less orders I make it should hopefully mean the less packaging I will receive. 

Step four

So I have this plastic in my hands now and the next thing I could do is reuse it all. The baggies can be super useful for storage, or sending items out to the Hallmarking office or similar. If you have the room it doesn't hurt to have a handful kept tucked away in case you can reuse them in the future. 

Step five 

There are some bits of plastic that will come that I just can't reuse. It's important that anything that can be recycled gets recycled and it should always be a last resort to let it go to landfill. 

Transparency

Being plastic free is unlikely and its important to be realistic about this. Plastic can be a good thing, it has revolutionised the world, but as with cake too much of a good thing can be bad for you. We must be mindful of when and how we use plastic and keep looking at what were doing to ensure were doing our best.