Here at Kismet Mosaic, we strive to reuse or recycle everything that comes into the store.
Cardboard—boxes mostly—either goes into our recycling bin or to a local recycling company (Urban Recycling). They may also be cut down and used in order packaging or in-house projects.
Bubble Wrap—each of our supply order boxes comes with 3 pieces of bubble wrap. We re-use that for packing outgoing orders. When we get 2-3 boxes per order and up to 4 supply orders in a month it start to add up.
Plastic Bags—most of our tile comes to us in resealable plastic bags. We save it all us and take it to local grocery stores that collect it for use by Trex in making their products.
Packing “peanuts”—we received a LOT of Styrofoam from an Italian tile manufacturer last year. These are oddly shaped and may be included in some outgoing packages.
Label backings and other business waste—these papers are not recyclable, so we use them in outgoing order packaging. This helps to keep our production waste to a minimum.
We also source bubble wrap and other packing materials from friends and other businesses and reuse them in outgoing order packaging.
We do buy new resealable bags from a local packaging company for breaking down the tile from the kilograms we purchase it in to the ounces we sell it by. These we reuse as needed. I’ve priced bio-plastic bags but didn’t find them to be at a price point I was willing to pass on to customers as “cost of goods sold” costs. Hopefully these costs will come down, but in the meantime, you can look into Trex recycling efforts and see if there’s a store in your area that collects for them.