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First of all, it's probably important to go through some of the main ingredients in Goupie, so that we can help you to better understand where the majority of waste is coming from.
1. Chocolate
This comes in card boxes, two 15kg bags to a box. The bags are made from plastic.
2. Toasted Rice
This comes on pallets of card boxes. The rice inside is contained by plastic bags.
3. Cocoa
This comes in paper sacks.
4. Golden Syrup
Comes in 25kg plastic tubs
Comes on pallets of card boxes. The palm oil itself is wrapped in plastic.
6. Biscuit
This comes on pallets of small card boxes. Inside the box, the biscuit is contained in plastic bags.
We'll also go through our packaging and the waste associated with this:
1. Goupie Boxes (both small and large)
Come in larger card boxes on pallets.
2. Goupie Outer Boxes (both small and large)
Come in pallets with no outer packaging.
3. Labels
Come in boxes on rolls of 500. The backing for these labels is glassine.
4. Goupie inner bags
Come in card boxes with a paper sleeve holding them together.
Now, we'd like to take you through how we handle these different types of waste:
1. Card boxes
Any card box which is undamaged is held in our stock room. We reuse these for small trade orders, being transported via courier. On the odd occasion, we may use one of the smaller boxes for your own Goupie order via the website.
For those boxes which are damaged, we collect them up and recycle them.
2. Golden syrup tubs
We keep a small number of these tubs in our factory for use as bins (if you're ever lucky enough to see inside the factory, you'll notice that not one of our bins was paid for!). The rest we donate to the local community.
So far, they've been used for bee keeping, fruit picking, small alcohol production, allotments and animal feed!
3. Glassine label backing
We've tried desperately to source an alternative to this backing, but have been told there simply isn't a solution available on the market at this time (if you know of one, please do get in touch!). We've also contacted the few specialist companies who collect and recycle this waste, only to be told that we're too small to be considered.
Our solution is to reuse this waste as packing material. We either shred, or use the backing whole, for both trade and consumer orders to protect our product. This means that we're not needing to purchase additional virgin material which would be required to do the same job. In fact, we've never bought packing material or additional outer cases - everything you'll receive has always been reused.
4. The plastic bags
The largest of the bags, we reuse as bin liners for the aforementioned golden syrup tubs. The rest goes to our local recycling plant. Our chocolate bags are also great to reuse as grow bags!
5. Pallets
We reuse all the pallets which are left with us, including their corner edging strips and sometimes their plastic covering. On the odd occasion, we'll have surplus. These we've saved for our own home compost bins.
It's pretty difficult to avoid a certain amount of waste if you're producing a product, especially if you have limited resources, but we're pretty pleased that we can get away with just one small trip to the recycling plant every 3 weeks. However, we don't think that this goes far enough.
Our main priority for 2020 are to eliminate our glassine waste, by finding a more circular solution, as we feel this is currently our most pressing issue.
We appreciate that our supply chain is not yet perfect, but we want to be completely transparent about that, and encourage our customers to feedback ideas on how we can improve. We promise we'll keep trying to improve and hopefully this will encourage our suppliers to improve as well!