Trading Ethically & Proudly
Our brand "Cotton Roots" featured on the BBC
Our Managing Director, Susan Waters is passionate about fairness. For this reason we supply Fairtrade, organic and other ethically certified garments to schools who want Fairtrade Certifed school uniform, companies who want to source ethically, charities and spiritual organisations who want to buy clothing in keeping with their beliefs.
Environmentally Different
Us! This is what we do.
Katt and Liz save all their fabric scraps and at the same time Karen, Ros and Kelly save the middle of the thread roles and cardboard tubes from the centre of fabric rolls, all this is donated to local schools and groups for arts and crafts, while courier bags are used by one of our suppliers to separate stock, they are completely unused so we donate them to local friends and businesses.
Karen revealed today that metal collar clips that come off some of the dress shirts work perfectly as paper clips and cardboard inserts are kept to put at the top of packed boxes before they are sealed, this keeps the garments are protected when the box is opened.
All the boxes that come into warehouse are reused.
Bagging of garments
We are currently talking to suppliers about reducing packaging on orders we receive and Tina and her team in the office are encouraging customers to select the no plastic packing option or at the very least, multi bagging which means we are constantly reducing our plastic usage.
As you would expect we also recycle everything that we can't reuse and we are constantly looking for more ways to reduce, reuse and recycle which includes the development of biodegradable box bags which we hope to be introducing very soon.
Re-use of spoilt garments and old uniforms
As manufacturers, on occasion, some of our embroidery and printing is not up to the standards we expect. This means that an otherwise perfect garment could be wasted. It is our company policy to find use for all of these garments. Lots of the fabric can be used for embroidery sampling and anything that is left is donated for rags to Willen Hospice.
Purchasing pre-used items
Whenever we can we purchase items which are pre-used.
Of course this saves us money which we think is great for business. Some of the items we are proud to have bought pre-used:- boxes, office furniture, pallet trucks, racking and picking boxes.