The Collective & Sustainability
As an online retailer we are constantly striving to improve the sustainability within our company and here are some of the things we currently do:
ONE TREE PLANTED FOR EVERY ORDER PLACED
Collective Dancewear have teamed up with a couple of organisations to help with reforestation of the planet. We donate 1 tree for every order you place and you can also chose to add an extra 2 trees to your order at a very small cost.
The organisations do incredible work across the world with restoration of forests, mangroves, sea forestation and also urban restoration.
USE OF RECYCLED AND/OR RECYCLABLE MATERIAL
Every year, the ecommerce packaging market produces approximately 10 million tons of CO2 equivalent.
We try to use as much recyclable or recycled material within the shipping of our products. Our current mailer bags are made of 75% of recycled materials and they can be recycled with soft plastic.
Our tissue paper, thank you cards and swing tags are made of 100% recycled paper and can also be recycled again.
PAPERLESS
According to The World Counts, there are 420 million tons of paper and cardboard produced each year, and more than five million acres of forest are cut down in an average month.
As a business we are trying to reduce our carbon footprint as much as we can and we try to be as paperless as possible, which is why you will not receive a printed order confirmation nor a return form with your order.
We also do not print any receipt at the pop up shops we do but we can email or text you a digital receipt.
We also use a cloud online accounting system so no receipts, invoices etc needs to be printed and stored anywhere as they are all saved online. And we are more or less completely paperless apart from having to print our shipping labels.
PRINTING OF SHIPPING LABELS
Printer cartridges take hundreds of years to decompose so to reduce the use of printer cartridges we print all our labels with a thermal printer. Our aim is to also replace the A4 printer with a thermal printer in the near future.
RECYCLING OF PACKAGING
We always sort and recycle any of the packaging we receive with the products sent by our suppliers. Any soft plastic is taken to specific recycling points for soft plastic, cardboard, tags and any other paper material is also recycled.
SOURCING OF SUSTAINABLE BRANDS
We are constantly looking for sustainable brands and products for you and we have recently introduced a couple of new brands that work with recycled textiles and more are on their way!
SHIPPING AND LOGISTICS
Finding a good shipping solution to reduce our carbon foot print is not easy for a small business. We try, as often as possible, to ensure that the first mile of your order's journey is as sustainable for the environment as possible. This is done by walking to our sorting office and Evri fulfillment office as often as we possibly can. We also work with some local dance schools where we do bulk deliveries to their dance students rather than sending out individual orders.
We are fully aware of that there is a lot more that needs to be done and we are constantly trying to improve our sustainability and to reduce our carbon footprint as much as we possibly can.