Greening Snorestore isn’t as easy as we thought

We’ve posted a lot about how we are trying to reduce the amount of plastics we use both in the products we sell and the packaging we use.

Over the last nearly two years we have reduced our single use plastics by a huge amount – most customers now choose an Eco or a Super Eco option (cheaper) and some of our suppliers have also moved to paper packaging (thank you Moldex).

It’s the packaging we use to despatch your orders which has proved more problematic. We were thrilled to discover a recycled envelope manufacturer whose use of vintage manilla not only fulfilled our desire to use paper over plastic, but whose envelopes also looked great. Then there’s Jiffy Green – a superb padded envelope which ticked all the boxes apart from being twice as heavy as standard padded mailers.

Unfortunately the former have proved to be less than robust when navigating Royal Mail’s unforgiving automated systems. We have had four reports of envelopes arriving opened or damaged, despite our best efforts at reinforcing the flaps and side seams with recycled sticky brown tape.

And as for the latter, it now seems that the glue on the flaps is coming unstuck on a random basis and customers are finding their stuff is delivered incomplete. We don’t want to use sellotape as that’s a plastic. And the thickness of the Jiffy Green design means our brown tape doesn’t work either.

We have also tried cardboard envelopes but they’re heavy too (more weight = higher postage cost) and again, the glue on the fold down flaps isn’t good enough.

As we can’t sustain the losses incurred by Royal Mail wrecking stuff in transit, we are reluctantly, and hopefully very temporarily, reverting to a sustainable, but not fully recyclable option.

Surely someone, somewhere, must make a robust, recycled and or recyclable padded envelope?

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