Sustainability
Central to our aims and objectives is the issue of sustainability. It’s a word that gets thrown around by all sorts of businesses and it’s often not given much substance. At Rice Up, whilst we can’t pretend that our operation is fully sustainable we will always consider moving as close as we can to that target in all our actions.
So, we try to reduce our environmental footprint by:
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Southampton Wood Recycling Project
Using low impact materials to refurbish the shop – Most of the wood used in the shop alterations, including the wood used for our sign, is reclaimed wood from Southampton Wood Recycling Project. We used environmentally safe floor varnish and paint and we have also used unwanted paint from the SCRATCH charity’s Community Repaint project.
- Using pedal power rather than the combustion engine when we can – we often used bike trailers to move kit around during the refurbishment of the shop and coop members use their bikes as much as possible for transport.
- Choosing products that have low food miles wherever possible – our policy on buying fruit and veg means we mainly stock seasonal, UK grown produce.
- Trying to cut out unnecessary packaging – we sell lots of products via our ‘scoop and save’ system which allows customers to choose how much they want to buy with only one lot of packing materials being used.
- Choosing environmentally friendly household products to sell – minimising toxic impact.
Rice Up Pedal Power!
- Installing a low energy LED lighting system in the shop – to reduce our power consumption as much as possible.
- Using 100% renewable energy – from Ecotricity.
- Using reclaimed plastic – for some of our food bins.
- Using second hand equipment – in the shop where possible.
- We have Freecycled unwanted materials – from the shop alterations.
