We at Tezelec Ltd decided a while ago that we wanted to “go green” in our warehouse by reducing our carbon footprint and increasing sustainability with an as eco-friendly business we can be proud to be a part of. Our challenge mainly was to know where to start.

We knew there were several ways our warehouse could go green, and decided there was no right or wrong way to start.

We started by upgrading our lighting throughout the warehouse to more environmentally friendly lamps. Our internal offices had a makeover from high energy fluorescent strip lamps to LED strip lighting, not only less energy consuming but a better lighting throughout the building.

We deliberately started to use less packaging especially plastic waste in our collections and delivery packaging. Any packing materials we receive, we reuse when sending items out to be shipped. We break down the cardboard waste and use it as a packaging item when it can no longer be used as a container and try to use as many biodegradable products as possible as we are all being made aware of how synthetic plastics can take hundreds of years to break down or pollute the oceans, where the biodegradable materials we use and reuse degrade within just a couple of years. Many biodegradable materials are also compostable and any excess material is always happily received at our local allotment as compost or mulch products. We have significantly reduced our packaging waste and decreased our carbon footprint by doing this one small thing.

We have also changed to using paper tape for all our packaging needs, reducing the amount of one use plastics in our warehouse.

We do enjoy putting items on Facebook sites for upcycling projects, the most popular product we recycle are pallets and cable reels. We have had several day nurseries in the area using these products as art tables for their children once they have been upcycled and it really does pass it forward to make recycling easier for everyone and we see it as a small step toward reducing our impact on the environment.

While many changes have been made in our warehouse, we also looked at ways to go green throughout the rest of our business. We decided that we wanted to go as paperless as we could possibly be and invested in technology that allowed us to do this with the odd exception. When we do need to use paper, we use recycled materials and all materials used in the office and warehouse is collected and recycled.