Eco-Shipping

When I first got this thing going, I had two ideas that I thought would reduce the environmental impact of the shop as well as save my business and my customers some money. One has worked rather well but I am being forced to stray a little, and the other has done next to nothing and I am about to can it.

Idea #1 Courier Delivery via Bicycle: This was actually one of the things that I thought was going to set us apart from other business in the area, but it really has had limited effectiveness.
The idea was that if I was going to be riding every day anyway, why didn't I spend some of each ride dropping off packages to local customers. This would not only save the customers shipping costs, it would limit the amount of fuel that was burned in the process of getting parts to customers, and if would also be a selling point for the business. For whatever reason, probably lack of advertising, the idea never took off. In fact it is probably a good thing that it didn't because I spend so much of my time packing up and shipping the regular orders that I wouldn't have time to do all the riding I would have to if the idea had really taken off. In the end I will probably kill the whole idea, but as we move to our new shop, I may start it up again for a limited local market.

Idea #2 Use 100% reused packing material: This idea made sense from the start, and has led us to be remarkable cost effective when it comes to shipping. To date we still have not bought a box for the purposes of shipping something in it. We have devised some neat ways to turn a large box that we get from a distributor into a lot of small boxes that go out to our customers. While this sounds relatively simple, actually doing it can take some time, so we have been working on ways of becoming more efficient at it. We have also become rather adept at turning cereal or cracker boxes into shipping envelopes for small parts like brake pads.

In terms of environmental impact, a strong argument could be made that it would be just as well just to recycle all this stuff and let a professional turn it into boxes, but our other issue is that there is no local Recycling pick up where we are, so we have to pack up all our recycling and take it to the recycling center. On the other hand, the mailman will pick up at our location, so we actually save ourselves a lot of trips by shipping our "trash" around the world rather than taking it to the recycle center. As I am typing this I am sitting next to a Trisket's box that is heading to Brazil. The Triskets box is sitting on top of a Raisin Bran box that is headed to Germany.

Every time I ship a derailleur hanger, two pages of our phonebook go missing so that the hanger will be well packaged in its little box. While ordering pizza has gotten a little harder, we figure that by the time the new phonebook shows up we be about half way rid of this one.

Our 100% reused policy has of late hit a small snag in that we have discovered Flat Rate shipping. Some of the items that we ship around the world are quite heavy, so the cost of shipping them can be prohibitive. The wonderful solution we have found is flat rate shipping. Basically USPS has a box that they provide and will deliver for a set price no matter how much it weighs. By stuffing these full of heavy items (like Stans solution) we can get our customers a reasonable deal on shipping. The only problem, it that you have to use their box. And so, as easily as that, the 100% reused policy went by the wayside. We do however still ship about 95% of our orders in boxes that are reused and packed with reused packing material.

I guess it's true what they say about the "best laid plans", but we are trudging forward with our 95% reused policy.... At least until we hit the next snag.