 As you get older you start to question things
You question whether a politician can ever be completely honest. You question whether you are the only sane person behind a steering wheel. And you question why it isn't legal to murder somebody who uses a mobile phone in a cinema. On a more global scale, you start to become aware of things that just didn't bother you when you were a youngster. One of the issues that is starting to bug me is how much waste our consumer-driven society produces. Week in week out, thousands of huge refuse lorries collect tens of thousands of tons of waste from homes all over the UK and take it to.............well where do they take it to?! I presume to some massive hole in the countryside, or to a fume-belching incinerator. Two things strike me on a very simplistic level; firstly if we carry on producing waste at this rate, we're going to need a very big hole to put it all in. And secondly I wouldn't want to live next door to a land fill site or an incinerator, so why should anyone else have to? What's criminal about the whole thing is that much of this waste is actually packaging that has only been used once. It could easily be recycled and used again (and again). So that's what we're trying to do! Shropshire County Council have introduced a recycling scheme for paper, glass and garden refuse. The latter is particularly innovative, because bags of garden waste are collected from householders, shredded, then rotted down to produce top quality compost, which is promptly sold back to the very householders who produced it in the first place! Providing that these schemes don't use up more energy than they reclaim, I can't see a reason for not supporting them. We're trying to do our bit in the shop as well - we send out many mail order packages every day, each of which has to be double wrapped for security and protection. If you've received one of our packages, you may have noticed that we use plain brown cardboard, rather than a fancy custom printed box. That's because none of this packaging is new - it has been 'harvested' from other retail outlets all over Shrewsbury. Like us, these shops don't want to waste cardboard, so rather than just throwing it away, they give it to us!
On a similar note, we would ask our customers not to waste the expensive packaging provided by manufacturers. Please hold on to this custom made material, because if you ever have to return your equipment to us for service, there is no better protection than the original box. Many manufacturers won't accept units back for service at all, unless they are packed in their original boxes. Re-ordering boxes from them is both wasteful and expensive - best to be avoided!
I am also conscious of the fact that many of our accessories come ornately packed, in an attempt to raise their 'perceived value'. You may be interested to know that we are currently negotiating with several manufacturers to get these accessories delivered to us in bulk quantities without any packaging at all. Not only is this much more environmentally friendly, it also saves our customers money, because fancy packaging costs a fortune. For example, one of our £50 leads comes in a box that costs the manufacturer in question £5 a time. And guess what everyone does once they've bought the lead? Yep, throw the box straight in the bin! What an unnecessary waste. Of course when you look at the 'big picture', all our steps amount to a mere drop in the ocean. However this problem is not going to go away and we all have to start somewhere! I'd end by saying one final thing, and that is that there's very little point feeling smug taking your bottles back to Tesco's bottle bank, if you then go out and buy a cheap, off-the-shelf Hi-Fi that you know full well will fail in a couple of years. Environmentaly, it makes much more sense to buy equipment that will last for a resonable period of time before it ultimately goes the way of all things. And that just happens to be exactly what we sell !
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