The sense and nonsense of saving paper...

Minimising waste instead of greenwashing!

We are of course fully in favour of environmental protection, not least because we are a shop for natural products!

That's why a few weeks ago we introduced the option to tick whether you want paperless shipping, i.e. without an invoice and advertising.

The result was: around 90% of customers want that!

That's great at first, but there were also problems: we have to enclose something with the parcels to document the contents, e.g. if the DHL label gets damaged. It's also necessary in day-to-day operations, for example when I print a stack of orders for my colleague to pack — somehow she needs to know which customer gets which goods.

So I printed a delivery note for that purpose — the same sheet of paper I would otherwise have used for the invoice. Since the invoice has much greater legal significance, this was completely nonsensical!

This is also called greenwashing: pretending to be environmentally friendly when in fact you are not. Which of course we want to avoid.

Therefore we are changing our approach again so that 1. the environment is impacted as little as possible and 2. if we do have to use paper, it's done sensibly and thoughtfully.

• From now on we will include an invoice again, but no delivery note, except in rare cases with complex orders. If a sheet of paper is required for legal and organisational reasons, then at least the most sensible one!

This makes more sense and saves all customers another annoying checkout box to read and tick, and it still reduces the advertising clutter by a few percent compared with before!