3 Green Moves That Will Lead Golden Canary Closer to its Goal
A Discussion to the Brand’s Road to Sustainability
At the beginning of this year, just two months after Golden Canary was born, it started a journey towards developing a product that was as close as possible to 100% environmentally friendly; not referring only to its functionality of helping conserve water, but meaning a complete “green” product from the materials it’s being manufactured from to the way it’s being packaged.
The objectives my brother and I set for the brand were 3:
Manufacture a 100% pure copper rain chain.
Use recycled cardboard for its packaging.
Change the foam actually used to wrap the cups of the chain to a recyclable material.
Just this summer of 2016, Golden Canary was able to tackle the first two. All rain chains offered are now 100% pure copper, different from the chains that were initially on the market, which featured a copper plated aluminum chain. Now both, the cups and the chain links, are solid copper and give the item the beauty and environmentally friendship it was though from the beginning, as copper is a material with virtually an infinite recyclable life; it can be used over and over again with almost no quality degradation.
Second and at the same type the all pure copper rain chains became available, Alejandro and I were able to change the packaging of the items as well. From a thin white cardboard box (which we were having problems with because it didn’t protect the chains well enough) to a thicker brown box made from recycled paper. The first two issues we tackled with this move were item protection and recyclability, but then it came to us a better idea. If you have purchased before a Golden Canary Copper Rain Chain, you might have wondered why it arrived in a plain brown cardboard box with no printed design. Well, it’s part of our effort to conserve energy and resources (ink) when it’s possible. Since we sell online only, we considered the packaging presentation was not critical; so as long as it protected the item and it allowed the chain to arrive intact to the customer, that was more than enough in fulfilling its purpose. And don’t worry about questions, doubts, features, concerns, etc. All important communication with customers is handled via email, avoiding the unnecessary use of paper in a world that’s becoming more virtual every day.
Lastly, the final objective the brand has yet to achieve is the replacement of the foam currently used to wrap the individual cups of the rain chain. This process is very important as it protects each copper cup from scratching itself with its neighbor, resulting in a damaged product. But as you probably know, styrofoam is the least of environmentally friendly materials and it’s the first we should have changed, but it has been a challenge to find a proper material which could provide the same function as the foam.
http://www.antalispackagingsolutions.co.uk/blog/geami-wrappak-innovation
Finally, we came across Geami WrapPack. What’s Geami WrapPack? It’s a combination of a patented die cut kraft paper with a tissue interleaf paper. These set of papers work with a converter (a special dispatching device) that expands the die cut paper to a 3D honeycomb structure providing a unique wrapping product. Tape use is banished too as items are firmly wrapped by locking the angled cells together. In simple words, Geami WrapPack is a green alternative for traditional bubble wrap and tape.
This is the final step Golden Canary is working on to achieve it’s 100% environmentally friendly product. We’re still studying its feasibility and the actions required to set it up and running. As soon as any advances are made on the project, we’ll be glad to keep you updated and we’re sure it will be a reason to celebrate when this move towards environment conservation is achieved.
