Our Steps to More Sustainable Packaging

How our jewellery and accessories are packaged to balance beauty with impact - from wood-pulp ribbon to paper-waste foam.

At House Thirteen we believe that the only thing that should last a lifetime is our jewellery - not our packaging. Even then, our jewellery can be melted down and re-created into something new at the end of its life.

Although we strive to create beauty, we try to minimise its impact at every turn. We want to get that balance between beautifully packaged pieces and impact right, but who says they are mutually exclusive? Our packaging has developed over the years and we continue to make improvements as new materials and innovations come to light. We’re still working on it, but here are some of the things that we are doing to minimise our impact and ensure that our packaging can go on to have another life. 

BOXES

We have chosen an eco-friendly option for our jewellery boxes which are made from FSC certified cardboard, which means that all materials come from an FSC® forest, where no more wood is cut down than the forest can reproduce. This means better protection of the animal- and plant life, and all foresters have proper training, safety equipment and a decent wage. Look out for the FSC stamp under the foam insert or at the base of the box. You can find out more about responsible forestry here. They are also held together with water-based glue. Our jewellery boxes can be recycled, so if you choose to store your jewellery elsewhere, you just need to separate them from the foam insert, so that the shell itself can be recycled as cardboard/paper in your household recycling. 

We have recently switched our foam inserts, which are usually made from crude oil. Foam inserts have been a real sticking point as they need to be lightweight, soft, be free from chemicals, should definitely not cause jewellery to tarnish and ideally come from a sustainable source. After searching, our inserts are now made from tail oil which seems to tick these boxes as it’s a 100% renewable raw material made from a by-product from paper production. But what actually is tai oil? To understand Tail oil we need to understand the basics of paper production. Paper is essentially made by felling, debarking and pulverising pine trees. It’s then softened and processed into a pulp consisting of wood fibres and water. This wood contains cellulose which is separated from the other parts, forming a by-product called black liquor. The water from the black liquor evaporates leaving black liquor soap which is then skimmed off and acidulated to make Crude Tail Oil. It is this that is used in our foam. The main advantage of this new sustainable foam is the fact that it is not made from plastic, which means that it has a much lower carbon footprint than previous iterations. A drawback is that the insert cannot be recycled currently but instead disposed of as household waste, so we see this as just a stepping stone to the next best alternative.

For full transparency, only our smaller boxes contain sustainable foam inserts as we ordered the larger necklace boxes before this became available. We will make the switch on the next order, and continue looking for an even better option. 

Our candle boxes are a little simpler. They are all made from kraft paper and no glue is used to construct them. You can recycle them by removing the candle sticker and popping them in your paper/ card recycling.

FINISHING TOUCHES

Our jewellery and candles are protected with recycled, recyclable, ph neutral tissue paper. They are all tied up in a sustainable bow with our ribbon made of wood pulp or recycled plastic bottles  - we’re giving both a go.

Our stickers are made from wood-free pulp, solvent-free adhesive and are totally chlorine-free. But when it comes to stickers I think we could do better and are still on the look-out.

Our “About” cards are printed on recycled silk paper. They are FSC certified, 100% recycled fibres, are recyclable and elemental chlorine free (ECF) bleached. ECF is a technique that uses chlorine dioxide for the bleaching of wood pulp. It does not use elemental chlorine gas during the bleaching process and prevents the formation of dioxins and dioxin-like compounds, carcinogens. 

And our thank you notes are printed on recycled and fully recyclable kraft cards, printed in small batches in-house.

POSTAL

We post our items in postal boxes which are made from 62% recycled materials and are fully recyclable. Smaller items of jewellery and our mini bubble tea-light candles are sent in eco-jiffy bags made with 65% recycled content and are fully recyclable, use zero plastic and stick with vegan-friendly adhesive glue. All secured with kraft self-adhesive tape where the adhesion is made from a special rubber and the tape is made from brown paper making it 100% biodegradable and recyclable. In addition the paper used for the tape has been sustainably sourced (- no trees were cut down for this product to be produced.) 

We usually walk to the post office and send all packages via Royal Mail - no fancy couriers making special trips to us here. Did you know that Royal mail has by far the lowest reported carbon footprint per parcel delivery in the UK? You can check out their sustainability efforts here. 

Phew I think that's it! If you have any ideas of how we can improve or know of some super cool new innovation we should try then we’d love to know. Shoot us an email sf@housethirteen.com