Environmental Policies
At HomeChip we have always been environmentally conscious. We have found that environmentally friendly ways of working make economic sense, as well as giving us a nice warm feeling. On this page we will give you a run down of the ways in which we try to help save the world's resources.
Packaging
Those of you who are regular customers will know that we usually use shredded paper as our packaging material. This is a convenient way of getting rid of the mountains of old envelopes, and unwanted post that tends to arrive through the letter box. We hope that you understand, and that you will dispose of it appropriately when it arrives. Even if it ends up in landfill, at least it is ultimately biodegradable, unlike plastic.
You may find that we use bubble-wrap to package especially fragile shipments. This is never bought new, but saved from incoming suppliers shipments.
Our boxes and jiffy-bags are all made from biodegradable materials. These traditional jiffy-bags are slightly more expensive than the bubble wrap lined ones, and also slightly more expensive to send (being heavier) but we feel that they provide better protection.
Printing
We have moved to a range of recycled paper for our packing slips and invoices. Although this is not quite as bright and shiny, our printers seem to cope with it and who needs bright, shiny invoices anyway? Needless to say, we have checked that the paper is not bleached with chlorine type bleaches. Oddly enough, recycled paper is cheaper too.
Carbon Emissions
We are aiming to reduce our carbon emissions as far as possible and have made a start in this direction by converting all our vehicles to use Liquid Petroleum Gas (LPG) rather than petrol. This results in a 20% reduction in CO2 emissions. It's cheaper too.
WEEE Regulations
We are one of the 20% of companies that actually registered under the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) regulations before the deadline. We are part of the Distributor Takeback Scheme operated by ValPak (view our certificate here). The fees collected under this scheme have been used to enable local authorities to set up the appropriate facilities for recycling waste equipment. Full details are available here.. This covers our responsibilities to our UK customers. Customers in other EU countries may return waste equipment (that you have purchased from us) to us and we will dispose of it appropriately.
RoHS Compliance
Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) compliance is a difficult issue. All the items we sell are either RoHS compliant or RoHS exempt. Those in the latter category are all "five out of six" compliant i.e. the only hazardous substance they contain is lead (always in solder) and they are currently exempt under the "Monitoring and Control" exceptions of the regulations. Even these will be moving over the medium term into the fully compliant category, although this will almost certainly be more expensive, as the reject rate from leadless fabrication processes is higher than leaded. In this category comes the iButtonlink 1-wire range of equipment and the Weeder serial modules which are both manufactured in the USA.
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