At GF Oats, we are extremely passionate about ensuring we re-use, repurpose and recycle wherever we can and within our business we are constantly looking for ways to reduce our environmental impact and improve our sustainability.
National Recycling Week (NRW) is one of Planet Ark's flagship campaigns and every year aims to educate and empower people to do the right thing when they're at the bin. Since the campaign was established in 1996, it is held every year during the second week of November. We here at GF Oats use this as a time we update our customers on our journey to reduce waste.
Repurpose Oats wastage
Occasionally we have stock that is damaged on it's way to us from WA, and or bags are broken and we can't allocate the stock to human consumption. This gave rise to the birth of the GF Oats Personal Care Range. GF Oats soap and Tub Tea Bath Salt blends. You can read more about this here.
Our Eco-friendly Pathway - Packaging
At GF Oats, we believe it’s more important than ever to switch from traditional plastics and wasteful packaging to biodegradable and reusable alternatives and we are aiming to ensure that 100% of all of our packaging is re-usable, recyclable or compostable by 2025, in line with the targets set out by the Australian Packaging Covenant. This commitment applies to our entire supply chain, from farm to plate.
Our commitment to improving our packaging solutions
One of the greatest challenges we have faced to date with our product packaging, is finding a fully biodegradable packaging solution that is suitable for consumable products with a shelf life of longer than 12 months.
Unfortunately, there doesn’t yet exist a fully compostable or biodegradable packaging solution for consumable products with a shelf life of longer than 12 months, which encompasses most of our oat products. This means that biodegradable packaging options simply are not suitable to maintain the freshness that is required for products such as our oats, which have a shelf life of longer than 12 months. Our packaging does comply with the Red Cycle program but unfortunately that program was not sustainable.
GOOD NEWS! So we focus on what we can do. For products that don't need to preserve long best before dates we use reusable or compostable packaging. Everything we use packing in our Online store we can reuse or recycle. Post boxes (ie packaging peanuts, paper, plastics) has been changed to 100% recycled or recyclable products. We now use natural alternatives to bubble wrap where possible replaced with packing peanuts, paper bags, shredded paper and recycled boxes, and have reduced unnecessary paper from our orders. We have also commenced using recycled plastic for our personal care products and consumable products with a shorter shelf-life.
Additional changes we have made are:
- Plastic mailer bags to recyclable ones (compostable seem to fall apart on us during shipping
- Small plastic packaging – compostable bags eg. around honey
- Small paper bags are used to cover the soaps in transit
- Plastic is recycled by the local Archery club. Read more here
- Large bulker bags used to ship the oats to Qld are sent to the local waste management where they are reused.
- Boxes, shippers, cardboard is recycled with local waste management services
- Power, we are conscientious as a team to turn lights off once a room has been vacated.
We know that it will take time to find the right solution for our business and that’s why we are invested in working with an independent company to mentor us through this process.
If you have any questions about our supply chain, and how we are working to reduce our environmental footprint and adapt more sustainable business practises, we always welcome enquiries, and you can submit these in the comments below or by sending us an email!
The GF Oats Team