As green as Rudolph’s nose

If you saw my post last week, you’ll know that we’re doing our bit to try and help our customer be a bit ‘greener’, and one of the ways we do that is by supplying reusable water bottles and coffee cups to help reduce the amount of these items being sent to landfill. Whether or not you use a reusable bottle, cup or shopping bag at the moment, the chances are that you are at least trying to do your bit – I imagine you put your plastic water bottle in the recycling bin rather than the rubbish bin for example. But here’s a question for you: do you know what happens to your plastic when it gets picked up? The answer might shock you… Here in Norwich, it turns out that our plastic ends up getting taken to Costessey Waste Plant, where it’s sorted and then – shock horror – sent to China to be recycled and turned into plastic toys. Yep, you read that right. Thousands of miles of transport, resulting in over 250,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere. Now that kind of puts a different complexion on the idea of “recycling” doesn’t it? It turns out that our recycling process is about as green as Rudolph’s nose. So, what can we do? Well, I’m not going to pretend that I’m an expert, nor am I going to denounce all recycling as not useful. But what’s clear is that the less we actually need to throw away – be it into the grey bin or the green bin – the less chance we have of fouling up our planet. And what’s also becoming abundantly clear is that the less plastic we use, the better the whole process is. Making alternative choices in the small things can have a big impact, and one of the ways that some of our clients have found to do their bit is by saying goodbye to as much plastic as possible, particularly when it comes to exhibition goodie bags. One simple choice is to use paper bags rather than plastic bags. They’re paper so they’re recyclable – you can see our range of paper bags here, and I reckon you’ll probably agree that not only are they better for the environment, they actually look better too. If you want to talk about how we could make your marketing and sales initiatives a little greener than Rudolph’s nose, perhaps we should have a chat.