Protecting the environment and sustainability was a major factor in the development of the Cliffe House (Organics) product range.
Of course there are many products in the market place that make similar claims and purport to care about the footprint of their products and packaging but many fail to back this up with any meaningful strategy, using the empty words instead as a marketing gimmick.
At Cliffe House we wanted the whole package of product and packaging to be as environmentally friendly as possible and after working carefully through the recipes and ingredients making up the products, turned our attention to the packaging.
After many trials and designs we sourced a paper from James Cropper, a paper mill in Cumbria that has the capability to recycle disposable coffee cups and convert into a high quality range of papers that we use not only for our wrapping the product but in our in-house label production (using environmentally friendly inks with zero packaging and specialist software that reduces ink usage).
Peter at Cliffe House (Organics) had visited the Croppers facility on many occasions (the same British company which makes the red paper for the Remembrance Day poppies) and already knew of their drive towards sustainability and reducing energy and waste throughout their paper ranges and after hearing of their new facility to recycle coffee cups we trialled some of these with a view to using these initially for our range of soaps.
In the UK, an estimated 2.5 billion coffee cups go to landfill every year because it has not been possible to recycle them. They also have a very high quality fibre content making them ideal to manufacture high quality papers. Disposable coffee cups from the major coffee chains are made of typically 90 to 95 per cent paper and the balance is a thin coating of polyethylene. James Cropper can now not only recycle the fibre content in cup waste but also recycle the plastic coating, giving a sustainable solution to the global problem of disposable cup waste.
Cliffe House (Organics) are proud to use this product within its environmental strategy and policy and in helping the planet (in our own, very small way) become a little more sustainable.