Green Beading: 5 Steps towards Sustainability

At Big Little Store, not only are we dedicated to bringing you the best bead products possible, but we also make sure to do our bit to be environmentally cautious. Here are the steps we are taking:

1. Our shop is powered by 100% renewable energy

We love that the energy used to power our shop and stockroom is from 100% renewable source. Along with this, we operate a door closed shop system, meaning we are always keeping the warm in and no energy is being wasted.

2. We carbon offset all of our shipments

For all of our shipments we send out, we donate a percentage to carbon offsetting programs that go towards protecting important areas around the world, including crucial rainforests that combat pollution.

3. Recyclable postal packaging

For our larger orders, we have transitioned to using cardboard postal packages which are 100% recyclable.

Fun fact: We have never bought bubble wrap! We reuse any bubble wrap we get from our suppliers or we use paper padding.

4. Bertha The Packing Machine 

Bertha is our trusty packing machine. Now, although it does use plastic bags to pack up the beads, the plastic is 100% recyclable (in accordance with certain council recycling schemes). This is also a much better option than packaging the beads manually. This is because we cannot adjust the bags to an exact size, meaning they could be too big and a wasteful amount of plastic and they are also less reliable, resulting in more splits and bead spillages.

Bertha allows us to choose the bag sizes, so we choose the smallest possible for each product so we are using as little as possible.

5. Paper bags for Bead Strands

There are some beads that can’t go through Bertha, so we need to package these by hand. We are now moving away from using single use plastic to colourful paper bags and reusable draw string bags (much cuter!).