Sustainability – crucial for small businesses like ours
- tcolecrafts
- Mar 18
- 2 min read
Last week we attended the Green Growth Awards ceremony as one of the finalists. This new competition, organised by Small Business Britain and sponsored by BT, aims to recognise the tremendous contribution that small businesses are making towards achieving Net Zero.
It was great to have the opportunity to meet and talk with about 100 other small businesses and to learn from their sustainability measures. The businesses represented a wide range of green initiatives from developing AI software to reduce business costs and energy consumption to creating outdoor exercise space for the over 70s. The two winners had taken imaginative steps to reduce their use of energy, one of them had even used special paint developed for use in space to insulate their whisky stills. Talking about our own business, reminded me of just how committed we are to sustainability although there is always more to do!
Sustainable materials. For our coffee sleeves and other leather goods, we use English vegetable tan leather which is a by-product of the dairy industry. Not only does this reduce the distance that the material has to travel to reach us, but the vegetable tanning eliminates the use of harmful chemicals in the tanning process. The cork fabric we use is also sustainable even though it has further to travel to reach us. It is produced in Portugal from the bark of the cork oak tree. This is harvested every 9 years and grows back, causing no harm to the trees which are protected by law. Shaved very finely, it is bonded to recycled polyester to make a flexible fabric.
Keeping waste to a minimum. When making our products we make every effort to avoid throwing anything away. Each scrap of leather and cork is kept and where possible used to make the smaller items in our collections. Thus, the offcuts from making coffee sleeves are used to make keyrings, the scraps from cork projects make bookmarks and earrings. All the tiniest leather scraps are collected so that they can later be combined with animal glue
and used to make flat-pack furniture
Reuse, reuse and reuse again. Our cradle-to-cradle philosophy sums up our approach. We encourage customers to return leather items that they are finished with so that we can re-purpose them as another item. So, a journal cover might become a coffee sleeve, a coffee sleeve might have a new life as a key ring. Finally, as a natural, biodegradable material, the leather can be returned to the soil.
Reducing our energy requirements. Much of our work is done using hand tools so our energy requirement is naturally quite low. Sometimes I just need a light to see what I am doing! The lowest power I use in a day is 5 Watts. Where I do need to power tools such as the laser that I use to engrave coffee sleeves, I generate the electricity for this using a solar cell, as it can be run by a powerbank. Not only does this make me independent of the grid, but it means I can do my laser engraving anywhere.
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