I Dress Myself

Many printers will claim to be eco friendly but they're often referring to, and exaggerating a small aspect of their process. We offer complete transparency and are committed to reducing our environmental impact at every level of our business. In fact, we think we're the most environmentally friendly screen printer in the UK.

Environmental policy

I Dress Myself is a Nottingham-based screen printing business that was established in May 2006 by Peter and Hannah Conway. We were joined by Helen Bartholomew in April 2008.

We set up I Dress Myself with an ongoing commitment to continual environmental improvement. As a responsible business we intend to grow and develop in a sustainable manner. We recognise that our operations have an impact on the environment and are committed to reducing this.

We were joint winners of the BEST/Experian East Midlands Green Innovation award, and were also nominated for the Special Award for Innovation in the 2007 Nottingham Creative Business Awards for our work towards reducing our environmental impact.

Last year we obtained British Standard BS8555 phase 3 certification under the Acorn scheme although after consideration we decided not to go for accreditation again this year.  For a small business it works out to be very expensive and we found we were spending more time documenting things than actually implementing change.

We are developing an environmental management system (EMS) to achieve this in a structured way and quantify some improvements by weighing waste and monitoring our energy usage. This helps us to assess our current performance and set realistic objectives to ensure a continual reduction in our environmental impact.

Our target to reduce the total waste from I Dress Myself by 5% by March 2009 was reached.  In the last year we have reduced our total waste by approximately 43% (recyclable waste by 48% and non-recyclable waste by 37%). Our objective to reduce car-use by 40% by March 2010 was easily attained when we decided to sell our car to make I Dress Myself car free.

We think that our approach has helped improve our efficiency, the quality of our service, and our relationship with clients. We believe it's helped to grow our business and hope that our progress will inspire other businesses to take a strong ethical and environmental stance too.

It is our policy to:

• Integrate environmental management into our day-to-day business operations to ensure environmental issues are addressed.
• Prevent pollution by minimising the discharge of chemicals used in the screen preparation and screen cleaning process. We use water-based textile inks that contain no harmful ingredients at all. This also means that we do not use harmful solvents to clean our screens down after printing - they are washed using just water. We recently purchased a large format film maker, which has much lower ink consumption compared to other large format printers and uses much more environmentally friendly inks than the traditional reprographics film making process.
• Charge proportionately less for organic cotton and bamboo T-shirts to encourage customers to buy these T-shirts and to help minimise the use of harmful pesticides.
• Minimise our use of natural resources such as energy and water wherever possible. We worked with the Environmental Technology Centre at the University of Nottingham to design and build a conveyor dryer for optimum efficiency for drying water based inks. The dryer reduces the time it takes to dry T-shirts but uses more power.  Partway there - we're looking into adapting it to improve it further.
• Promote the use of renewable energy.  Although our landlord is tied in to a contract with E-on (one of the worst climate change offenders), we persuaded our landlord to move over to their green tariff electicity deal with us paying the difference. E-on's green tariff matches every unit of electricity used with a unit generated from a renewable wind or hydro source and supplies it back to the national grid. As the electricity we actually use comes from a variety of sources E-on also uses a carbon off-setting scheme. We think that carbon off-setting is unsustainable and look forward to being able to change to a more ethical energy provider as soon as our landlords contract with E-on is up.
• Re-use resources whenever possible rather than dispose of them. We re-use any misprinted T-shirts for test printing and then for rags. We use yoghurt pots and margarine tubs for mixing and storing ink. All paper is used on both sides and then recycled. All cardboard boxes and packaging we receive is re-used using recycled paper labels. Our compliment slips are printed onto old unwanted postcards, our badges are packaged in printed used match boxes and our T-shirt and poster packaging is all made using 100% recycled card.
• Recycle as much as possible. We use a specialist contractor 'Wastecycle' to recycle as much of our waste as possible, as efficiently as possible.
• Encourage the use of recycled materials and recycling initiatives. Where possible we obtain all our office furniture and printing equipment from recycling initiatives like Freecycle or second-hand from e-bay or charity shops. Where possible, any unwanted equipment is sold on e-bay or given away. We pledge to buy recycled paper and card where possible and all our stationary and packaging are made from recycled paper and card.
• Comply with all relevant environmental legislation, regulations and requirements, and stay up-to-date by accessing the NetRegs website run by the Environment Agency, and relevant web pages on the Nottingham City Council Health and Safety Department, Health and Safety Executive and Business Link websites.
• Consider the impact of our working and personal lives. Not part of our policy but we're all vegan.
• Ensure that existing and potential clients are aware of our environmental aims and credentials by actively promoting these on our website.

Author: Hannah Conway (Partner)
Date: 6th July 2006
Last update: 6th June 2009