At the Totnes Nappy Company we do all we reasonably can to run the business in a sustainable and environmentally conscious way.

We are constantly striving to move towards a more sustainable business and have many plans hatching, some will be put into place soon, and some (our own wind turbine to power the office for example) may remain just as plans for some time to come!

For as long as we have been trading we have been a virtually zero waste business. All packaging that comes to us is either reused for its intended purpose or scrumpled up to use as void fill in bigger parcels. Boxes that arrive to us that are too big for us to use again are happily taken in by the business next door for re-use. The tear-off strips from our DHL bags and mailers stumped us for a while before we realised that the local Scrap Store would take them so they are now bagged up and destined to be made into monster hair or streamers! We of course reuse every bit of paper as either note paper or drawing paper for the kids before it is recycled. We have a compost heap for tea bags and food waste.

We use recycled paper and most of our mail bags are made from recycled plastic which, on investigation, turned out to be the most environmentally sound choice as even biodegradable mail bags won't biodegrade in landfill sites as the conditions are not condusive. Our very big mail bags are biodegradable or we reuse the large mail bags that come from suppliers. If we need to use bubble wrap (for bottles) we always use what has been sent to us by suppliers. We never buy bubble wrap (we do however very occasionally pinch some from next door but luckily they buy the green variety anyway!).

Our website is hosted by Ecological Hosting, a brilliant company that we have been proud to deal with. As well as being ethical and environmentally sound they are also particularily brilliant at what they do. The website is hosted on servers run on wind powered electricity here in the UK. The internet has done much to further environmental causes but when you consider the electricity consumption of millions of servers on 24 hours per day it is so important that everyone who has a website considers how they could improve its carbon footprint. www.ecologicahosting.co.uk We wholeheartedly recommend them.

We try to source products that are made by ethically and environmentally sound companies. Luckily in the world of nappies that is not too hard. We favour UK, then European-made brands and if there is a UK alternative we will stock it but we do also have a few carefully chosen brands from further afield when we feel that the uniqueness of the product is worth it. We are very proud to be stocking natural baby toiletries from down the road, from the brilliant Beaming Baby in Halwell (about 6 miles from us) and from Vital Touch (about 7 miles). We are not just stocking them because they are down the road, we stock them because they are excellent and down the road!

We still have a way to go before the business is carbon neutral. Our biggest problem, environmentally speaking, is getting your goods to you. If anyone knows of an affordable green courier company that comes anywhere near the South West let us know.