OVER-VIEW AND STATEMENT.
At Autotag we continue to take a number of steps to improve our environmental footprint.
At a Corporate level we changed the nature of the business by relocating from London nearly ten years ago to the Somerset town of Frome. The aim of this move was to create jobs for local people in a town that had been hard-hit by industrial decline. Most staff have a travel distance to work of less than 1.5 miles, and we also allow home working in a number of cases. This was not the case at the London premises and as such the impact of our company ‘commute’ has been vastly reduced.
More than 95% of our products are made in the UK, most within 100 miles of our location. Our competitors prefer cheaper imported products that probably generate increased profit for them but at the cost of quality and a greater cost to the environment. We have studiously avoided this approach, to our own financial detriment, but it is in keeping with the values of the company.
AUTOTAG PRODUCTS.
- Keytags
Our keytags are RECYCLABLE. They are made from polypropylene.
In 2015 we moved away from using wet ink printing, thus negating the issues of solvent and ink disposal. Our competitors still use wet ink processes and we are proud to be leading the sector on this front
We now offer alternatives to plastic type products, and reduced plastic products. In addition, we have introduced a number of products that use materials that would otherwise be scrapped.
We continue to research and adopt raw materials that are more suited to bio-degradation.
We have no control over how our customers choose to dispose of our key tags, however, when customers (in this case mainly car dealers) have finally finished with their tags we encourage them to return the used products to us for recycling. This is via a discount or buy-back scheme and is very popular, as you might expect. We can then reprocess the plastic into other products. Customers may wish to recycle keytags themselves via local kerbside collections. They are classed as plastic number 5 and are reprocessed into products that require strength and heat resistance such as mixing bowls, spatulas, cutting boards, shovels, watering cans, automotive battery cases, oil funnels, ice scrapers, storage bins and shipping pallets.
Our customers value the strength and durability of our keytags, with many keytags having a useable product life of years unlike the single use (supermarket-type) plastics that have quite rightly been the subject of much recent debate.
Our proven range of keytags are also capable of being used for more than one vehicle or property, again dispelling the single-use argument.
It is of note that our keytags frequently survive the “lost keys” scare and are handed in to police stations or indeed to Autotag for repatriation to the owner.
- Key Cabinets and Metal based products
The majority of our metal based products are made within ten miles of Frome.
- Paper and Card based products
We try wherever possible to minimise the amount of packaging that our suppliers send with our raw materials. The cardboard outer packaging that is supplied to customers with our product is recyclable, whilst received cardboard is recycled under an agreement with Veolia.
The energy we use as a business is something we monitor closely. We encourage our suppliers to use best practice, and apply ourselves to minimal power usage; indeed, we have reduced our own energy requirements by the use of solar panels and low wattage devices such as LED lighting. Our procurement procedures also ensure we use logistics companies that can show carbon efficiency. Like many modern offices we strive to be paperless and prefer the use of email as a communication method.
AUTOTAG FACILITIES.
The Autotag offices and warehouse are powered by 100% renewable electricity via hydro, solar and biogeny generators, for every unit we use a unit is put back into the grid. Our gas is 10% biomethane from organic matter, including manure!
Our drinking water is supplied by WaterAid with all plastic bottles being granulated and recycled, we apply a reduce, reuse and recycle policy throughout the business, even our general housekeeping is green clean via eco-friendly cleaning products.
