Waste, Recycling & Packaging

With the plight of waste, plastic and recycling in the forefront of everybodys mind. We thought we would let you know what we are trying to do at Jane's Boutique to offset as much as possible and to do our bit to help.

The fashion industry is notoriously bad at creating needless waste we try wherever possible to recycle and reuse. When items come from the wholesaler there immediately 2 noticeable issues. The items either come on plastic hangers or in sealed plastic bags. We have approximately 300 plastic hangers per week. Believe it or not our local recycling centre does not accept these. A couple of years ago I got together around 2000 hangers, loaded them into my car and took them to the recycling centre, only to be told to "put them in the general waste". So I brought them back and went round to the local charity shops to give them for free. For around a year this worked well. The charity shops were using them for themselves or bundling up the better ones and selling them. We were then told that the hangers were no longer needed so what do we do with them now? A lot of our customers in the shop take a majority each week for themselves & we do send out a box full to another customer. All we ask is to pay the postage of £6 so let us know if you would like some. Its a shame there isnt some way to send back to the wholesaler or manufacturer but they simply arent interested.

The plastic bags are a similar problem. We try wherever possible to reuse them in packaging to either put the clothes in for protection or to use to bulk out parcels. Again we tried to recycle but are told to put in general waste.

We use DPD courier for all of our deliveries. All plastic bags are fully recyclable.

Boxes are much easier to reuse. We literally recycle every box by using as packaging for our online orders. We even go around to other small and large businesses in our shopping centre to reuse their boxes as well. So if you have a delivery from us with Gillette Shaving Gel written on the side, you know we have reused the box.

We also try to reduce our energy by changing our old flourescent lights to eco friendly LED ones.

Its hard as we are one small shop in vast wasteful fashion business but we are trying to do our best!