Global Recycling Day

Each year, there are hundreds of designated days you may not have heard of, but that doesn’t make them any less important. One such day is Global Recycling Day. But when is Global Recycling Day? Global Recycling Day falls on the 18^th March each year, and serves to spread awareness and promote the act of recycling and reducing our impact on the environment. In this journal entry, we will outline our sustainable practices that we enact all year round to ensure our impact is minimised, as well as giving you some tips on how to use pampeano products sustainably.

One of the key ways we use recycling in our production processes is how we source our materials. All of our raw leather comes as a bi-product from the meat industry – if it wasn’t being used it would just be waste, going to landfill or worse. We take this waste product, the cow hide, and lovingly create handmade leather accessories. We treat the leather with a natural vegetable tanning process – which is much less harmful to the environment than the chemical treatment most mass-produced leather undergoes – and then hand craft our pieces with the restored, sumptuously soft leather.

Another key principle of lessening your impact on the environment is reducing: that is, reducing the amount of material used. We make sure we use the least amount of material by maximising each piece of our cow hide. The small offcuts are not thrown away, but used instead to craft our smaller accessories like our keyrings, and even on our belts for those small leather belt loops.

Across our whole business, we made the pledge to stop using single use plastic altogether. At the outset of pampeano in 2008, our packaging was always plastic free; our branded gift boxes aren’t shiny, they’re matt; shiny packaging means a thin film of plastic. Our leather products arrive in attractive paper bags and boxes made from card. If you are so inclined, we would encourage you to re-use these elegant boxes yourselves, either in the obvious way as a storage box for your pampeano belt, or as a pen holder, a sewing kit, or coin tray. More recently we switched our sticky tape used to seal boxes to paper based, which is 3x more costly but significantly better for the environment.

This isn’t the only way we encourage people to minimise waste when using products from pampeano. The very fact that we ensure that all of our premium products are of the highest quality and will last for many years helps our customers to steer away from the ‘fast fashion’ cycle, and invest in quality accessories that they can buy once and wear forever. We write helpful guides on care for your leather accessories as well, to help prevent any damage from taking place. We also help if our products falter – we had a customer emailing us with a 6 year old belt where the pin had snapped – we gladly replaced it for them. We never want to see a pampeano product thrown away.

Our warehouse waste is 60% recycled at present. We want to increase this. We are working with our suppliers to reduce the plastic they send to us, and for the last three years, plastic bags wrapping inbound goods are with recycled plastic – not-too-pretty cloudy grey colour, but clearly better for the environment than virgin plastic.

We welcome other ideas from our customers and colleagues as to what we might be able to do to reduce our environmental foot print. Please email us at customer.services@pampeano.com if you have any thoughts.