Biome Lifestyle - The struggles of an ethical retailer (part 1)

The struggles of an ethical retailer- part one.

When we founded Biome Lifestyle, four years ago, we thought we would simply be offering great style, produced in harmony with the natural environment.

Oops. It turns out that the world is rather more complicated than that!

It’s a simple question. “What’s ethical (or “eco” or “green”)? But I feel like a politician who can’t give a simple answer to a simple question. We’ve learned so much since we got going, and I need to share some of it with you.

Take cotton. Grown as an industrial-scale crop, I found out that cotton is one of the world’s heaviest users of pesticides and fertilizers. True, it provides employment for lots of families in poor countries, but guess what the chemicals do to their water supply? So I will always prefer to sell organic cotton. It’s not that the other sort is damaging to my customers, but I just don’t want my supply chain to feature dead rivers or polluted wells.

Or think about glass. We all “recycle” glass, I’m sure. Some of us have embarrassingly large numbers of wine bottles to recycle every week! But what happens to the glass after it leaves us? Apparently most of it is ground down for use in road making, and very little of the glass you put out ever gets into another consumer product. But I discovered a Spanish company that uses nothing but post-consumer recycled glass, and makes really excellent and imaginative plates, glasses and jugs with it. I just like knowing that all the fuel that went into making the original glass is somehow being re-used in the things I sell.

And now I’ve got to break off writing this, and talk to a bamboo-grower. I’ll tell you why next time!