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. If you're looking for complete transparency about the environmental impact, we can give you the facts about how we work. We're 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 T-shirt design and screen printing business that was established as a Partnership in May 2006 by Peter and Hannah Conway in Nottingham.

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. However, we recognise that our operations have an impact on the environment and we are committed to reducing these.

We recently obtained British Standard BS8555 phase 3 certification under the Acorn scheme. 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.

We are developing an environmental management system (EMS) to achieve this in a structured way and are happy to provide the necessary time and money to implement this EMS. We measure our improvements by weighing waste, measuring our water, energy and chemical usage and monitoring transport activities. This will enable us to assess our current level of environmental performance and compare our performance to that of our competitors. With this in mind we can prioritise and set realistic objectives to ensure a continual reduction in our environmental impact and monitor our progress as we go.

Our current objectives are to reduce the total waste from I Dress Myself by 5% by March 2009 and to reduce use of the car by 40% by March 2010.

We think that our approach has helped improve our efficiency, the quality of our service, and our relationship with clients. We also believe it's helped to grow our business and hope that our progress will help to 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, whilst providing an excellent service and quality products to all our customers.
• Comply with all relevant environmental legislation, regulations and requirements, which we will keep up-to-date on 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.
• Minimise our use of natural resources such as energy and water used in the screen preparation process by cleaning and/or preparing a number of screens at any one time.
• Re-use resources whenever possible rather than dispose of them. We re-use any misprinted T-shirts for test printing and donate them to Savanna Rags for use in the third world or to be made into rags. All paper is used on both sides and then recycled. Old catalogues are donated to playschemes and used teabags are composted.
• Recycle as much as possible. We use a specialist contractor 'Wastecycle' to 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 equiWe pledge to buy recycled paper and card where possible and all our stationary and packaging are made from recycled paper and card.
• 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 can be washed using just water.
• We use organic cotton, organic cotton and bamboo T-shirts so that we do not cause or promote the use of harmful pesticides.
• Ensure that existing and potential clients are aware of our environmental aims and credentials by actively promoting these on our website and when tendering for printing jobs.

Author: Hannah Conway (Partner)
Date: 6th July 2006
Last update: 29th June 2008