As a CEO I’ve always been very aware of the role a business can play in its local community, and I am proud to say that Cardwave has a good track record in this respect, including providing very focused support to local community organisations and a local primary school.
I’m also very aware of the environmental responsibilities of a business, and that we can take advantage of opportunities to influence our customers and suppliers as well as our own practices. At Cardwave we receive pre-packaged goods from suppliers, and we package goods to send out to customers. We can ensure that what we send out meets environmental standards – for example by minimising our use of plastics and selecting local suppliers who also minimise plastics, both to support the local economy and reduce transportation miles. We have also helped customers meet their own packaging standards by undertaking packing as part of our end-to-end service, and ensuring that as far as possible we use locally sourced, environmentally friendly packaging to do this.
It is inevitable that our suppliers’ goods come to us packaged, and we do our best to ensure that supplier packaging gets a good second life. In some cases this means ensuring recyclables are recycled, but we can also put more creative strategies in play. This is why we support Wiltshire Scrapstore.
What is Wiltshire Scrapstore?
Wiltshire Scrapstore is part of a national network of Scrapstores whose core aim is to give waste materials a second life through providing craft and maker activities. Within that fairly simple statement lies a myriad of different possibilities. The Wiltshire Scrapstore collects a wide range of materials, and uses them for many different kinds of activities such as children’s crafting clubs, mental health workshops, stroke rehab groups, classes to learn skills, events and activities for all ages and abilities, and even team building events for local companies. They pass down traditional skills such as leather-working, and they even find the resource to manage a community cafe which provides locally sourced gifts and crafting kits alongside coffee and locally made cakes.
What Wiltshire Scrapstore achieves on limited financial resources and the time and expertise of generous-hearted and very able volunteers, is amazing. But it can’t achieve anything at all without the donations it receives, and this is where Cardwave can play its part, alongside many other businesses in Wiltshire.
It all started with pink foam
Some years ago we found ourselves with a large pile of antistatic foam, which had been used as a packaging material to protect flash drives we were buying from Taiwan. While this foam did its job for our supplier, when we had programmed the flash drives they were usually placed in different packaging, and so the foam became obsolete.
We weren’t sure if the foam could be recycled and it didn’t appear to have any additional use to us. We didn’t really want to just throw it away, so we kept it. Eventually we had a mountain of the stuff, and it was all pink! One day, a member of staff suggested we donate it to Scrapstore.
That was the start of something for us, and Scrapstore started coming along to collect the foam at regular intervals. Last year a new team member mentioned over a coffee that her cousin worked for Wiltshire Scrapstore. We realised we were still throwing stuff away that could be useful to Scrapstore, we reassessed, and started giving them much more.
Everything has value to someone
Still, we didn’t really know what Wiltshire Scrapstore was doing with our “waste”, so I decided to find out, and recently I popped over to them for a visit. One thing I learned was that the pink foam from Cardwave is now one of their most popular items! I still have no idea why it is popular, maybe because it’s pink and different from the foam they get elsewhere.
With my business hat on, I have to admit that whenever Scrapstore comes to collect what we regard as waste and what they regard as useful material – including pink foam – they save us from paying to have that material taken away.
But donating what we regard as waste to Wiltshire Scrapstore is about far more than saving money. They simply couldn’t function without the materials that are donated to them, and all the good they do which brings so much great social value could not happen. It is embarrassing to me to think that we spent time not supporting them, and then, until our staff member opened our eyes, not supporting them fully. But then again, you don’t know what you don’t know, and once we learned more about Wiltshire Scrapstore we changed our practices to support them further.
Businesses don’t exist in a vacuum
Businesses don’t exist in a vacuum, and the value they create is not just economic. Of course we employ people, and feel a sense of duty towards their wellbeing. But businesses are part of a wider community, and it has always been important to me that Cardwave ensures it sits within the community, not somehow separate from it.
That ethic is behind all the things we’ve done in the local community over 20 years of providing our business services. Donating money and volunteer time to projects is one side of this. Donating our waste, which has absolutely no value to us, and indeed we have to pay to get removed, is another approach.
It doesn’t cost us anything to donate to Wiltshire Scrapstore, and it helps them create huge social value from their activities. It shines a light on good environmental practice, and we can help a great local charity do its work. We can also help them in other ways, for example by helping to raise their profile, and using some of our business skills in ways they think will benefit them.
We’ve started a relationship which I hope will grow and develop, and be beneficial to us both.
