Our Green Policy @ FHTM Maternity Clothes

Green Policy

If you’re looking at this site, you’re probably going to have or have just had a baby. So the future is important. There’s a lot of green-washing going on out there – companies doing exactly what they like, regardless of the environmental cost, but donating a bit of money to planting trees or conservation funds. We’re not green activists or earth mothers - but we know our customers want us to be responsible. So here’s our take on it.

Is the internet is a more environmentally friendly way of shopping?

Hmm. Lots of people have looked into this for supermarket shopping, and it is better to shop by internet, by a long long way. Apparently it’s mainly because of the repeated car journeys. I’m not so sure for our type of shopping though, nobody’s really done a proper study, but we look at it like this:

-The postman/courier is already using his van in your area

-The products take one less journey (if you are even a moderately sized retailer you’d buy stock from a supplier, send it to your distribution centre, then send it out to your shops)

-The packaging is no more than you would get from high street retailers (actually, you might not even get a polythene bag – most shopping carriers aren’t recyclable)

-You don’t have to make several trips in your car, searching for maternity products (see above about repeated car journeys)

So we’ll leave you to make up your mind on that one.

Power

All our power is sourced from 100% percent renewable energy. And we use as little as possible, not least because it’s really expensive. All our lighting, equipment and heating is on timed switches, nothing on standby. We don’t have air-conditioning. We have windows – and fans. Lots of complaints about that one.

Travel

Our staff live locally, in the summer we walk to work when we can. We do have to use a car for business mileage, but it’s a highly efficient Honda type thing that uses the minimum amount of petrol.

Packaging and Delivery

All our items are despatched in their original packaging, often tied with tissue paper and then sealed in 60 micron polythene bags. The tissue is recyclable and so are the polythene bags (although if you could reuse them, that would be best).

We don’t have van come to collect our parcels and take them to the post office: there’s a main post office nearby and someone walks there with the parcels in a trolley, several times a day, in the rain (not me) or the sunshine (I may volunteer). It saves about 0.2 mile per parcel, and although that doesn’t sound a lot, we send out lots of parcels! It may not always be that way as we are growing fast BUT while we can we certainly will.

Waste

We are currently in a pilot scheme with GRUNDON to recycle almost all our waste including paper, cardboard, plastic, tins and bottles (from garment labels to shipping boxes - it can all go in). Sadly this scheme isn’t available to all businesses, and then again some businesses don’t want to do it because it’s more expensive than landfill, but it’s working well for us.

Product Miles

This is the trickiest one, which is why I’ve left it until last. Judging the amount of miles a product travels is very difficult, but we generally source from manufacturers and distributors in the UK and a few fashion houses inside the EC (Denmark, Holland). It’s in the nature of the fashion industry to ship garments in two seasons per year, so for the EC deliveries we tend to get a few very large deliveries rather than many small ones.

Even then it’s not unusual to find that garments sold to us by UK distributors in are originally manufactured in the Far East. If you look, you’ll probably find most items in most chain retailers are manufactured there. We have spoken to our suppliers at length on this issue and it turns out that there’s very little clothing manufacture going on in the UK, with the major centres of manufacture being Turkey, India and China.

But there is some good news: some of them use shipping freight to get their products rather than air freight, which is better, but still not ideal. And most of our suppliers are quite small – and they care as much as we do about trying to minimise their impact on the environment. We’re working on it.

There's probably lots of other things we can do - and if you have any suggestions for us we'd love to hear them.