Sustainably swimming uphill

Damn it, if I wasn’t to grow my business as a sustainable one, what would I be doing it for (other than to pay for children’s shoes, and Legos)?

It seems that sustainable decision making like packaging choices seems to change in difficulty that is measurable like a bell curve as a business grows. First it’s easy, then it becomes more difficult and then it gets easier again. First, I was just making everything by hand in very small quantities so it wasn’t hard to strategize avoiding plastics for shipping. For Pete’s sake, my husband makes our store shelf salve displays by hand from locally reclaimed wood. You would think that is pretty much as far as one would have to go. Today, I was preparing a shipment for Amazon and they told me I need to bubble wrap it. Now, last time I checked, bubble wrap was one of those things that sits in a landfill for about…forever. So today I spent the day hand wrapping an entire shipment of salves in recycled and recyclable cardboard padding. What a mess! As our business grows, we will be able to custom make more sustainable and less labor intensive packaging and shipping solutions like bioplastics that are compostable and so on. But for now, I am relying on one thing my mother always hoped would pay off in the end, pure stubbornness. Let’s just hope the powers at Amazon will accept my green alternative to bubble wrap. Until next time…