Plastic Free Postal Packaging

Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Today I'm going to show you how I package my honey in 100% plastic-free product packaging. So if you order honey from our website, or if you're a friend and lucky enough just to kind of get sent some through the post, or if you're one of our competition winners on Twitter, you will have seen our product packaging before. We also do our gift boxes like this. These are the boxes that they come in, and we order these, so these are new boxes. I've been through lots of different iterations of product packaging, and we really, really don't like single-use plastics. So we've worked really hard to get you some mail-order product packaging which is virtually 100% plastic-free. And I have to put virtually in there because there might be a small trace amount of plastic within the adhesive on the paper tape that we use, but we're talking kind of 0.001% of the weight. Um, so like I say, we have to say virtually plastic-free, but kind of it is as plastic-free as you're likely to get in terms of a product packaging. So this video, I'm going to show you how I package up the honey, how we make it safe for to go through the post, how we keep it under that all-important 2 kilograms per package, which means that we can kind of send it out for a reasonable, reasonable price with Royal Mail, and just give you an insight as to how and why we use plastic-free product packaging. So the first thing we need is a box. Now I order my boxes through www.kitepackaging.com. They use a lot of recycled Cardboard in the new cardboard boxes, but we don't use recycled cardboard boxes. So we tried to start doing that and use our old Amazon delivery boxes to send honey out to people. Didn't think it looked very professional, but also we ran out of boxes really, really quickly, so we couldn't keep up with the demand. So this is the box that we use. It's the perfect size for 4 jars of 8-ounce honey. You can get 6 jars in here as well at a push, But you don't get adequate protection around them to keep them safe within the post. So the method that I'm going to show you is a really, really good method for keeping that honey safe within the post without using bubble wrap or air pockets or any of the stuff that kind of uses those single-use plastics that no one likes. So this is the box that we use. We put a nice stamp on it as well. So I'll show you the stamp in this video. That's a really good way of branding your boxes for a really, really cheap amount. So this is how our boxes come. Like I say, they're from Kite Packaging. These work out about 50p a box. All of the costs do add up when you're doing product packaging, but I mean, these are, these are a good quality, cheap, efficient, and effective cardboard box. So the first thing that we do on our cardboard boxes is we take our stamp. So that's the stamp that we had made. Really recommend this. It's a great product, obviously Black Mountain Honey, made by a company called stampit.co.uk, not to be confused with stampit.com, which is like a, a pressed concrete manufacturer. But these are really good, and I'll show you how these work. So all you do is you take your Stamp It stamp, press it in the ink, and then give it a really firm Push, and then that gives you your branding on there. So like I say, really quick, easy, and cheap way to make your boxes look a lot more professional, um, without kind of getting them printed individually, because the costs really do rack up quickly. So then we put the box together, and this isn't one of those silly frilly boxes that has 20,000 folds. It's as simple as that. So that's the box done. So then the next problem that we had was what do we put inside the boxes apart from the honey? Of course, we needed something to protect the honey from bangs and knocks and breakages in the post. So you could use polystyrene peanuts, you could use an air pocket, you could use bubble wrap. And all of them single-use plastics and just creating unnecessary mess. So we looked at a lot of the biodegradable kind of cardboard and paper products on the market, and they're good, but they're kind of quite expensive, and there's still quite a lot of embodied carbon within those products because they've had to go through a manufacturing process. So obviously I still need to put them through a manufacturing process here, but what I do is I use all of our kind of old pamphlets and cardboard boxes and stuff that we get through the post, and I just put them through a shredder. So that is 100% plastic-free. The box is 100% plastic-free. This is 100% compostable. So if you get this, just chuck it in your compost bin or chuck it in your paper recycling bin. It can be recycled or it can be composted. Really good for compost, actually. So we take a big handful of this and we pop it in the bottom of the box. So we fill the box up until it's about half full. It compresses down later on. So that's that step complete. So then you take your honey, and we experimented with just putting the honey in the box like this and sending it off, and that didn't work. Obviously it still cracks around even with loads more kind of paper fill in there. You're not getting the protection that you need. So we come up with another solution, and that solution was to reuse the cardboard inserts that we get when we buy our jars. So we buy jars by the pallet load And they come in boxes with these cardboard inserts in between. So what we do is we cut up these cardboard inserts and then we tape them to the box using a plastic-free tape. So it's a paper tape with a little bit of adhesive on it just to keep the cardboard on, and then that gives the jars protection in the post. So when you're cutting the— when you're cutting this paper, you want to make sure that the cardboard is ever so slightly bigger than the jar. So hopefully you can see that there, the cardboard is bigger than the jar, and what that does is it gives you an overhang at either, either end, an air pocket which creates, um, space in order for the jars not to knock against each other. So then we roll Each jar up like that, and like I say, you've got this space there and a space there. And then we take a piece of this paper tape, or you can use a masking tape. And we put that on the jar like that. And then that's giving you protection from the side for knocks, but it's also giving you that rim around the edge. So if you get any knock, it would need to be a really, really pointy one in order to do any damage. So this gives really good protection. We've had great, great success with this. So that's the 4 jars complete. If you don't have sheets of cardboard like this, Amazon delivery boxes are really, really good for this. I mean, they're clean, they're a good thickness, they're plentiful, and you're much better off reusing something like this as opposed to recycling it. I mean, when you get these home, you can either shred them, put them in your compost, compost, or you can recycle them anyway, but they've had that extra use. So then the embodied carbon within the cardboard is split over 2 uses as opposed to just being used once for an Amazon delivery or to kind of go in between some jars and then to be recycled. You're getting further uses out of it. So that's how we set this up, and we place them like that. So as you can see, there's still a little bit of movement in there. What I then do is I get— go back to my fill, and if you push them all over to one side, get some fill in one corner, and then push them back. Do the same on this side, get some fill in that corner, and then push them all into the middle, create a void there. And then put them in, put some fill in the middle as well. And then a little bit of fill on the top. And then that's it. So then when you're buying something from Black Mountain Honey, we always like to throw a little something extra in there as well. So at the moment we're throwing in a pack of free wildflower seeds that was given to us by the Welsh Honey Cluster. We did our own wildflower seed promotion early in the year. Those go in. Sometimes you get a honey dipper, that can go in. You always get a little postcard with information about how we make the honey, what the bees forage on, various kind of nice fun facts. That goes in. And then one of my business cards as well. And then all that's left is to close it up. And that's it, you've got a really nice neat package. Now the bit where we fell a little bit short before on this is that we used plastic tape to kind of seal this up. So I used to work with twine and I used to put nice twine around it. You may have seen the twine boxes, and unfortunately the post office said they can't accept brown paper packages with twine anymore, or any colour packages. So that was really sad because I thought it looked nice with the twine, so I had to start using tape. And then it annoyed me that everything— we've gone to all that effort to try and make everything like plastic-free and sustainable and recyclable and compostable, and then I'm using plastic tape. And it didn't look very nice as well. So I now use this kind of eco Tesa tape. And like I say, this is where the virtually comes into it, because for each, you know what I mean, gram of tape, there's probably 0.001 grams of adhesive on it, and that adhesive does, does contain kind of a very minute amount of plastic, but it's the best we can do. We can't send stuff in the post without it being sealed up. They won't let us do it. It needs to be sealed apparently. So all we do then is we take one piece of tape and we just seal the box with it. And then just to add that finishing touch, we add a couple of wooden little bees onto the front just because we can, um, but also because I think it does look quite nice, finishes the package off nicely. So that's it. If you follow these steps, you should get a package that weighs under 2 kilos. So I reckon 99 times out of 100, it comes in under 2 kilos. I had one the other day and it was 2 kilos and 6 grams, and they wanted to charge me 3 times the amount, um, to post it because it was 6 grams over the 2 kilos, which was a bit annoying. Apparently they can't waive 6 grams. So what I did is I just opened it up and took out about 6 pieces of those paper and then sealed it back up again, and it was under. But the really good design with this, you know what I mean, if you get it right and you soon kind of come to gauge the amount of fill you need in there to do this, is that it comes under 2 kilos which means that you can send it through Royal Mail for a reasonable amount of money. So I think it works out about £4.50. I know we do £5.95 delivery on our website, but we need to do that in order to kind of COVID the costs of kind of driving to the post office and all the other stuff and the packaging and all this kind of bits and bobs. So I think £5.95 to cover the box, the fill, the time that takes me to do that box, the delivery to the post office, plus the actual delivery charge, it is a reasonable amount for 4 jars of honey up to 2 kilos. So you might ask yourself, why am I giving all other beekeeping companies or beekeepers this information? And I mean, other beekeeping companies probably do this a lot better than I do, but I know some other companies, some other not beekeeping companies, they just stick loads of plastic in their packaging. And for me, this isn't about us getting a competitive advantage on people. This is about providing you with a product that has the lowest possible impact on the planet as possible. So I'm doing this video in the hope that others will follow suit So other beekeepers, other beekeeping companies, other companies who sell stuff out there, you really don't need plastic wrap. You don't need cellophane around the edge. You don't— we don't want big, bubbly, airy pockets in there. All we want is the product to arrive as safe as it possibly can do and for it to have as minimal impact on the planet as possible. And I think that's what we've done with this packaging here. So if you've got any questions about the packaging, I'm always happy to talk about it. Like I say, all of us here at Black Mountain Honey, are very passionate about carbon reduction, sustainability, and our impact on the planet. So always happy to talk to you about that and answer any questions. So that's it for today's video. Really hope you've enjoyed this one. Please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time.