Sustainable Practices Policy

Silk & Stone is committed to practicing and promoting sustainability to reduce waste and pollution for a healthier environment. We are concerned about our environment and care for the health of our community, customers and the general population including all living things. We aim to follow and promote good sustainability practices in all areas where we have influence (ourselves, our employees, our consumers, our community, etc.) in order to reduce environmental impacts and contribute to a healthy and safe planet.

PRINCIPLES

Our Sustainability Policy is based upon the following principles:

To comply with, and exceed where practicable, all applicable legislation, regulations and codes of practice.
To integrate sustainability considerations into all our business decisions.
To ensure that all staff are fully aware of our Sustainability Policy and are committed to implementing and improving it.
To minimize the impact on sustainability of all office and transportation activities.
To make clients and suppliers aware of our Sustainability Policy, and encourage them to adopt sound sustainable management practices.
To continually strive to improve our sustainability performance.

PRACTICAL STEPS

In order to put these principles into practice we will:

Travel and meetings

Encourage our clients and employees to walk, cycle and/or use public transport as much as possible.
Reduce the need for our staff to travel by supporting alternative working arrangements, including working from home, etc. and promote the use of public transport by locating our offices in accessible locations.
Compensate our employees for walking, biking, taking public transportation or carpooling to work.
Keep a bike repair kit, lock and air pump in office for employee or client use.

Purchase of Equipment/Products and Consumption of Resources

Minimize our use of paper and other office consumables (using paper on both sides, reducing margins & line spacing to print on less papers, electronic payroll, using empty areas of paper to be recycled for notes before recycling, purchase relevant books for clients to browse through as they wait rather than magazines that need to be recycled, etc.), and identifying opportunities to reduce waste.

Concentrate more on reusing rather than having to recycle (reuse packaging and shipping materials, product containers, boxes, purchase products and ingredients that have bags/containers that can be reused, etc.)
Reuse or recycle office waste, including paper, computer supplies, and equipment.
Reduce the energy consumption of office equipment by purchasing energy efficient equipment.
Limit the use of water, heat, A/C, electricity as much as possible. (turn off lights & computers at night, keep lights off in rooms when unoccupied, turn off heat/air conditioning as soon as its not necessary, only turn on water faucet as you need it and limit wasting as much as possible, etc.).
Purchase electricity from a supplier committed to renewable energy and try to maximize the proportion from renewable energy sources.
Purchase fair-trade and/or organic products and ingredients for making our products as much as possible.
Product packaging: Purchase recyclable containers and containers that customers can easily reuse for household, office, etc. purposes.
Use green cleaning products as much as possible to reduce fumes.

Working Practices

Promote sustainable practices to consumers: (promote our policy and good practices on our website and in our stores, encourage clients to reuse containers and give them $1.00 off every container they bring back to refill, etc.)
Ensure that our employees follow sustainable practices at work.
Ensure that any associates that we employ take account of sustainability issues in their advice to clients.
Include a copy of our Sustainable Practices Policy in all our proposals to clients, vendors and on our websites.

Advice to Clients and General Consumers

Undertake voluntary work with the local community and / or environmental organizations and make donations to seek to offset carbon emissions from our activities.
Incorporate sustainable practices in your daily lifestyle.
Promote sustainable practices to your family and friends.